H.P. Lovecraft meets the Bronze Age – Designing Ancient Horror

I wrote recently about the excellent Lovecraftian board game Eldritch Horror. That post was actually something of a preliminary to this one. You see, for the last several months I’ve been working on my own version of Eldritch Horror, set in the East Mediterranean Bronze Age.

Earlier this year, my friend and colleague Anna Judson called us together to play something else – her excellent Mycenopoly: an Aegean Bronze Age themed version of Monopoly, complete with barter system and utilities such as textile works and the ability to build megara instead of hotels. I highly recommend checking out her own blog about it, which went a bit viral, and deservedly so. Apart from having an excellent time with Mycenopoly, the evening left me wondering if it would be possible to do something similar for the game we most often play together, Eldritch Horror.

Film review: Arrival (2016)

I finally made it to the cinema to see Arrival last night, a couple of weeks after it came out to great acclaim. Promising an intelligent take on first contact with an alien species, with particular emphasis on the linguistic business of deciphering the alien language and writing system, it was a film I was very eager to see. I hesitate to call myself a linguist proper just yet, but my current research is very much on the linguistic and writing-systems end of archaeology, and I’m very interested in any film adaptations of ‘grown-up’ written science fiction (Arrival is based on a short story by Ted Chiang), so Arrival looked to be right up my alley.

 

That said, some of my linguist friends were wary, fearful of how Hollywood would treat their discipline, despite the generally favourable reviews of Arrival’s linguistic content. So in the end, how did it stack up? Was it the masterpiece several reviewers have hailed it as, or was my friends’ caution justified? The answer, it turns out, is somewhere in between.