Captainscruptious - Just Here To Linger Like The Pest I Am

If your reflection is missing

1. Do not touch the mirror. If you have already touched the mirror, SKIP TO STEP 15 IMMEDIATELY.

2. First, make sure that your reflection is really gone. Make sure that you are visible. If you are not visible, the lack of a reflection is normal.

3. Check another mirror to see if your reflection is there. If so, the mirror without a reflection is simply broken and needs replacement.

If you have confirmed you are visible and your reflection is gone from all mirrors:

4. Do not touch the mirror.

5. Fill a bowl with water. Overnight, leave it at the base of the mirror nearest to your bed.

6. When you wake, if the bowl is empty, your reflection simply has business elsewhere for a while. You may rest knowing your reflection will return when they are ready.

7. If the bowl is still full, your reflection has been taken.

If your reflection is gone:

8. Be ready. They may come for you.

9. Prepare for a journey. With your reflection gone, you may pass through the mirror, but first, be sure you are prepared.

10. Bring food and water. Beyond the mirror, eat or drink nothing unless it has specifically been offered to you. Dying of hunger or thirst is better than the alternative.

11. Tie one end of a ball of string around your ankle, and the other to something on this side of the mirror, like the foot of your bed. This will not help, but sometimes reassurance is necessary.

12. Do not trust what your eyes or ears show you. Count the number and direction of each step you make. Make no marks. Take nothing with you. Leave nothing behind.

13. What state you find your reflection in will vary. I cannot advise you on this. Trust your instinct. Do not trust them.

14. Follow the steps you made back to the mirror. Do not let your reflection ahead of you. They will be grateful for your rescue, but they may still try to leave, trapping you in their place.

IF YOU HAVE ALREADY TOUCHED THE MIRROR:

15. I’m sorry.

16. Try to wash the chrome off your hands. You will not succeed.

17. Wait. Be ready.

18. They are coming for you. There is nothing you can do.

19. I’m sorry.

More guides

A guide to sleeping

How to Sneak Food from the Kitchen at Night

If you are a researcher or adventurer and want to share a guide, join our subreddit!

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Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

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Today the Department of Extraordinary Upcycling salutes B&E, a pair of backyard farmers in Idaho who used a pair of old satellite dishes and a trampoline frame to construct an outstanding UFO chicken coop for their growing flock:

Although it doesn’t feature a tractor beam to lift the hens into their house, the coop is insulated, ventilated, heated, and equipped with surveillance cameras and LED lights throughout for that extraterrestrial ambiance.

Head over to Backyard Chickens for process photos and additional info about the creations of this geektastic chicken coop.

[via Neatorama and Backyard Chickens]

“Ey Up Gromit, meet our new lodger, Mr Vorhees. He’s from America lad! He doesn’t say much but I think he likes Hockey! Keep him company whilst I go to the shops, there’s a good boy.”

All shot practically using miniatures and figures.

‘Pumpie' 

Elephant soft toy made of grey felt, dressed as a sailor in a smart, dark blue, woolen jacket and matching trousers, England, 1900.

It would be a real shame if instead of being covered by paint, which can be removed, bronze statues of racists were to come into contact with saltwater or tomatoes and be destroyed by irreversible bronze disease.

Life manifests itself in infinite forms. Science Posters By Kelsey Oseid on Etsy

yall look at this shit ad*be is tryna pull now on ppl who have outdated software:

(note for context: i’m all for piracy, but in this case my copy of CS6 was downloaded years ago when they were giving it away to students. i got it totally legally.)

Proposed leitners

- warrior cats book that when you open it you are instantly mailed by 30 feral cats (one is very orange)

- the very hungry caterpillar (corruption)

- a book that looks like a dictionary but when you open it it’s completely blank except for one page in the middle that says “bitch”

- toaster manual that burns you alive as you read it

- magic treehouse book just filled with the phrase “jack adjusted his glasses”

- flip book where a shadowy figure gets slowly closer until you’re done and then you turn around and he’s behind you

- how to harvest bones for dummies

- 1984 except you just get really angry over George Orwell’s misogyny (actually not a Leitner just normal 1984)

- alternatively 1984 but you open it and the text is just from A brave new world and you’re filled with the all encompassing urge to stir and nothing else until you drop dead

- Photo album of Jonah Magnus (warning: very ugly)

- Les Mis Manga

- a book you open that has another smaller book inside it so you open that book and it has a smaller book inside it so you open that book and it has another smaller book inside it so you open that book and it has another sm

- book that every time you dog ear it… it dog ears YOU

- book that sucks you into it’s world but it’s not a fun adventure it’s some nonfiction about the Black Plague and you’re starting to feel very ill

- Dr. Seuss book Oh The Places You’ll Go except if you’re giving it to someone for graduation or another big change in their life it locks itself shut and begins to scream

- Garfield comic compilation but the pages? Made of Lasagna.

- pride and prejudice but without the pride and prejudice