Zozobra day today -- time to burn down Old Man Gloom

I'll be heading out to Santa Fe later today...still recovering from some sort of flu like illness, but I think I'll be up to seeing the Original Burning Man once again!

Zozobra was created by regional artist Will Shuster, an interesting and important local figure, historically. For my family its something of a tradition, and I've been going since I was about 4 or 5 years old.

Scale Model Page of the Solar System

I just had to share this scale model of the solar system I stumbled across while perusing Reddit. It's a great way to demonstrate in visually truncated form just what kinds of distances we're looking at on an astronomical scale...

Chernobyl 25 years later

I am endlessly fascinated with Pripyat and the other areas aroudn Chernobyl, its the closest we have in the modern world to an ongoing experiment in decay. Anyway, fascinating pictures. I know people like to complain about how all modern day shooters set in grim, dirty post-apocalyptics environments seem to only come in shades of brown and grey, but there's a pretty good reason for this. It's a tiny slice of Fallout without the unpleasant issue of the rest of the world suffering the same fate.

I expect the next generation of grim dirty brown shooters to do a better job of modelling wrinkling paint chips though, after seeing these pictures!

Anyway, reminds me of a great short story set in the region written by Tim Curran (a great modern pastiche author of the mythos, track him down if you haven't read him before) in Horrors Beyond 2.