A purely personal note (not even D&D)

I’ve been doctored.

It hardly hurt at all.

Next step: an actual honest to goodness job. I understand this is the hard bit.

Derinkuyu discovered by accident

bldgblog is always worth reading, but this latest post is dungeon delving gold:

No one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn’t discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he’d never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people—and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away. Other passages suggest that at one time all of Cappadocia, above and below the ground, was linked by a hidden network. Many still use the tunnels of this ancient subway as cellar storerooms.

And that’s just for starters. If you don’t think architecture and city zoning laws are part of your dungeonscape, you might want to reconsider how a little creative accounting can lead to creative space invasion.

Serendipitously, the equally useful History Blog tells us that the Stepped Pyramid at Saqqara is now being held up by airbags. Which raises the possibility of a Tomb of Horrors that could inconveniently deflate.

Finally Jess Nevins has an intriguingly architectural curse/reinforcement ritual to share. Of course you hold back water with souls. Best of all, bridges built on souls. Or subway systems, your choice.

A question for my American readers

A pair of superimposed maps* of the US and UK over at swordnboard has me thinking questions about nationalism and imagination. To whit:

do you consider English/British history to be your history? As opposed to the history of a foreign land (let’s imagine, say, Turkey or Hungary or Morocco, without going too far afield). Is Britain part of your heritage?**

If yes, is there any date at which it stops being your history and becomes foreign?

* with distractingly different projections, but never mind that.
** note this is not a question about cosmopolitanism or universal heritage a la UNESCO. Neither am I asking Ben Anderson’s wedge question about whether you feel pride or shame or whatever about Agincourt or the defeat of the Spanish Armada or Newton. And of course Americans come from all over – hell, even I’m one these days.