Neo Deco London or the end of post-Blitz Brutalism
New builds are taking stylistic cues from prewar Art Deco, oftentimes replacing postwar Brutalism, which aside from the Barbican, was always disliked by the public.
Sustainable Fashion or King Charles III’s wardrobe
The British monarch famously wears—and repairs—bespoke items for many decades.
Antiqua et nova or the Vatican’s position on AI
Inevitably, the Catholic Church is concerned about the possible deification of an intelligence greater than our own. The presumption of AI’s infallibility has already created problems. Safety parameters induce LLMs to lie or obfuscate—and we already have a euphemism for when chatbots make things up—they hallucinate.
Martians Refugees or CIA remote viewing
I’m thoroughly aware there’s no evidence humanity evolved from ancient Martian refugees fleeing their dying planet. Very Superman, no? But I do enjoy entertaining the thought!
The attached PDF is a transcript of a remote viewing session conducted by the CIA in 1984. During the experiment, the subject was given specific coordinates on Mars and asked to describe what he saw at location in the year 1,000,000 BC.
According to the remote viewer, he saw pyramids, obelisks, an ancient race of aliens shielding themselves from a rapidly failing environment. The most interesting quote from the document:
……They're ah.....evidently was a....a group or a party of them that went to find ah... new place to live. It's like I'm getting all kinds of overwhelming input of the.... corruption of their environment. It's failing very rapidly and this group went somewhere, like a long way to find another place to live.
It’s implied by the architectural descriptions that those ‘aliens’ fled to Earth. As to why their environment failed:
Oh, I get a globe…..ah…it’s like a globe that goes through a comet’s tail or….it’s through a river of something, but it’s all very cosmic. It’s like space pictures.
A planet ruined by the debris of a passing comet: the same hypothesis was put forward by outsider archaeologist Graham Hancock, who argued a similar impact caused a civilizational collapse on Earth 13,000 years ago in the Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse. The second season aired this fall.
Academia disputes Hancock’s claims—that’s why he’s an outsider archaeologist at best, and a kook at worst—but it is interesting that this remote viewer from 1984 claims a similar catastrophe destroyed an ancient Martian civilization. Maybe this is Hancock’s source material. Who knows. Have a read.
It’s highly entertaining and proves my most controversial opinion is correct: conspiracy theorists have produced better speculative writing than the entire canon of science fiction combined.
The trend of borrowing from (often nearby) art deco buildings had been going on in London for several years, it seems like cherry picking to use this as an example of a "Neo Deco" revival of Art Deco