Further Mexica content: Emily Short's review of MEXICA, procedurally generated stories around Aztec legends.

The creator, Rafael Pérez y Pérez, has articles here :

MEXICA: a computer model of a cognitive account of creative writing
The Three Layers Evaluation Method for Computer-Generated Plots

As what we watch and read becomes more closely monitored, proc gen art will become the new pulp. I'm laying down a marker, here.

I never know how late to these parties I've arrived, but here:

Things I Won't Work With

A quick paragraph or two from some selections:

From "Sand Won't Save You This Time":

Let’s put it this way: during World War II, the Germans were very interested in using [chlorine trifluoride] in self-igniting flamethrowers, but found it too nasty to work with. It is apparently about the most vigorous fluorinating agent known, and is much more difficult to handle than fluorine gas. That’s one of those statements you don’t get to hear very often, and it should be enough to make any sensible chemist turn around smartly and head down the hall in the other direction.

From "Azidotetrazolate Salts":

An early favorite has appeared in my “most alarming chemical papers” file for this year. Thomas Klapoetke and Joerg Stierstorfer from Munich have published one with a simple title that might not sound unusual to people outside the field, but has made every chemist I’ve shown it to point like a bird dog: “The CN7 Anion”. The reason that one gets our attention is that compounds with lots of nitrogens in them – more specifically, compounds with a high percentage of nitrogen by weight – are a spirited bunch. They hear the distant call of the wild, and they know that with just one leap of the fence they can fly free as molecules of nitrogen gas. And that’s never an orderly process. If my presumably distant cousin Nick Lowe does indeed love the sound of breaking glass, then these are his kinds of compounds. A more accurate song title for these latest creations would be “I Love the Sound Of Shrapnel Bouncing Off My Welder’s Mask”, but that sort of breaks up the rhythm.

With Mexica in the news of late, what with tzompantli and skulls and whatnot, it's worth remembering what an astonishing civilization they were.

Here's the Florentine Codex online. If the Aztecs had survived Cortez, kids would watch cartoons informed by their toltecat aesthetic, play Eagles vs. Jaguars, and beg their parents to let them take macuahuitl classes.

Reconsidering the lurid tale of Nag Hammadi.

(ht to Marginal Revolution)