April Pieces Of My Mind #2

  • Here’s how a 1st millennium back-yard iron furnace works. It’s like grilling bacon (ore) until all the fat (silicate slag) has dripped away, and continually adding more bacon until you have a hefty chunk of solid meat protein (iron). The grill consists of charcoal. A puddle of grease (slag) is left behind at the bottom of the furnace. The reason that the protein chunk doesn’t sink into the grease puddle is that it’s relatively cold in the grease collection pit. Each droplet of grease solidifies as it lands. Eventually you get a thick layer cake of solid grease, whose viscosity is high enough for it to support the weight of the protein chunk.
  • So pleased that three of my young excavation participants from fieldwork in recent years have a) gotten good jobs in archaeology, b) joined the exclusive club that I like to call Chinese Spouse Fandom.
  • Even if you and your friends don’t play music, you should take professional band photos now and then and release them.
  • Listening for years to Fredrik Strage’s interview podcast, I have been struck by how self-perpetuating rock’n’roll mythology is. Rock gods almost universally report that they didn’t enter rock mainly because of a passion for music, but because Kiss blew their minds with their image when they were twelve. “I had to learn to play the guitar because that was the only way to become a rock god.”
  • The public tends to believe that archaeologists want to excavate interesting sites that come to their attention. This is true in many cases. But almost no archaeologist has a paid job that lets them excavate interesting sites that come to their attention. This is confusing and frustrating to the public.
  • Submitted a pretty gruesome journal paper titled “Human skull manipulation in Vendel-Viking Period Sweden and Denmark”.
  • Ladies, beware! If he says he wants to clothe you in silks and velvets, then he isn’t your generous passionate lover. He is a gay fashion designer!
  • Hey gender studies scholars! I’ve cycled into town while listening to a podcast about 1920s horror fiction, I’ve attended an art-historical guided tour of a cinema, I’m having a cup of hot chocolate and a piece of extremely decadent chocolate mousse cake named “Elliot”. And I am ready to do an in-depth interview about traditional cis-het Swedish masculinity!
  • In 2019, J.E. Macedo de Medeiros defended his PhD thesis in archaeology at the Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg. He was so confident of the importance of his work that he titled it Hoard finds of the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages: a process-logical paradigm shift (my transl.). Five years later, no such shift has to my knowledge taken place.
  • I had to check. You have to cross at a minimum three national borders to travel from Iran to Israel. This threat of war is like if Portugal were menacing Switzerland.
  • For a fine example of Swedes not being able to say ‘dj’, listen to the excellent 1992 hit song “Stone Me Into The Groove”. “Oh, my saviour, my friend, yust take me away”
  • I don’t know about other scientists and scholars, but man, I love my source material / study objects. I’m a pro, not an amateur, but sometimes I feel more akin to those who approach archaeology for love, in their spare time. Amator in Latin.
  • Hopefully there will be a NASA rover on the south pole of the Moon less than a year from now.
  • One of the many ways people mystify me is in their need to get out of their heads. It’s spring cleaning day in our housing area. In shrubberies within 100 m of our house I found packaging for alcohol, nitrous oxide and tramadol. I think everybody should just read a book instead.
  • I met a man the other day who told me he worked as a “backender”. I was confused: surely this is the opposite of “boob man”?

My Medieval LARP Upbringing

Reading a new book about investigations in Medieval churches, I suddenly recognise a correspondence in my childhood. I spent much of it a) singing in the choir of Saltsjöbaden’s extremely lavish and archaic church, b) reading mid-to-late 20th century fantasy fiction, c) role-playing in fantasy worlds.

I recently visited the church basement for the first time and found that it is a bare, functionalist cast-concrete and rebar structure from the 1910s. And when I try to read fantasy fiction now, it’s obvious to me how it has been glued together (not always very skilfully) from fragments of the historical Middle Ages.

I became an archaeologist because I grew up in a 20th century stage set that reimagined the Middle Ages, although founded on a concrete structure that looked like a subway station.

Favourite Living Authors

Someone on a podcast mentioned favourite living productive authors. Here are mine. I wonder who I should read that’s born after me, after 1972?

  • Bill Bryson (b. 1951)
  • Lois M. Bujold (b. 1949)
  • Michael Chabon (b. 1963)
  • Corey Doctorow (b. 1971)
  • Elizabeth Hand (b. 1957)
  • Kenneth Hite (b. 1965)
  • Jonathan L. Howard (b. ?)
  • Mary Roach (b. 1959)
  • Kim S. Robinson (b. 1952)
  • Jon Ronson (b. 1967)
  • Andy Weir (b. 1972)

April Pieces Of My Mind #1

  • I like to combine visits to my university in Łódź with side trips to see the country. Last year I was in Lublin and Kraków. A few weeks from now I’m going hiking in the great old-growth forest of Białowieża National Park!
  • Just a reminder: the Epoch Times news organisation and Shen Yun travelling shows are propaganda outlets for Chinese Scientology. The conflict between Falun Gong and the Chinese Communist Party has no good guy, only two bad guys.
  • Prepping a conference talk about metal-detecting in Sweden. Considered titling it “Swedish metal-detecting is slowly starting to rock”.
  • Does my paper about Viking skull manipulation include the section header “Talking Heads”? Of course it does.
  • If a news item mentions that a man is 26, it can be good or bad. But no man described as being 52 in a news item is ever good. He’s either bad, dead or horrendously wounded.
  • I don’t understand why Darth Vader’s girlfriend is named PubMed.
  • Polish orthography, how a certain vocal sound is represented with Latin characters, is highly consistent. I found it to be the easiest part of learning Polish. After all, I’m a native speaker of a language that thinks stjärt and höskörd is reasonable spelling. Polish, Swedish and German agree that compounds should simply be written as one word, no space or hyphen. Add this to Polish orthography though, and you end up with words that will hit an everyday English-speaker like a kick in the groin: WCZESNOŚREDNIOWIECZNYCH: “Early Medieval” (plural, genitive case)
  • My son sent me a song he’s just written with mythological lyrics about a hero who fights the Sun Shader, gets his head knocked off, searches the world blindly for his head, and finally steals the Sun Shader’s head as a replacement. ❤
  • It’s 2004. Someone gives you a non-OCR:ed scan of an article in Polish that is highly relevant to your work. It’s effectively a set of photocopies. You don’t know any Polish. What do you do? It’s 2024. Someone gave me a non-OCR:ed scan of an article in Polish that is highly relevant to my work. It’s effectively a set of photocopies. I just screenshotted it one column at a time and pasted it into Google Translate, and now I’m reading it in my native language.
  • Maybe creativity is like a really flaky LLM that tries and fails to spout conventionalised averages of whatever it has been fed with.
  • My kids are first-generation digital natives. Wonder for how many more generations there will be a digital world to be a native of. I don’t worry about humanity going extinct. But it isn’t looking so great for the techno-capitalist complex’s long-term survival.
  • Jrette is headed for engineering school in Lund. So I’m thinking about a Scanian project so I get to go there a lot, look at finds at the university’s Historical Museum, have lunch with my kid. Might extend it to Zealand as well, it’s not far.
  • My attempts to keep track of who’s Black and who’s Jewish and who’s Black and Jewish in Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue read like a deranged Nazi’s kill list.
  • Hint of subcultural/class-related homogeneity in my RPG gaming group: the members have a total of seven children, named Samuel, Samuel, Signe, Signe, Emilia, Heidi and Ossian.
  • I knew that the name Oscar is from McPherson’s fake Scottish folk poetry. Today I learned that Selma is too. Both names have been common in Sweden.
  • Historical correctness of the material culture in Verhoeven’s 1985 Flesh+Blood, ostensibly set in 1501: forget about it, they didn’t even try.
  • Anybody feel like gyring and gimbling? In the wabe?
  • Bought two climbing roses, planting soil and barn manure. Swapped out a lot of the old soil in a big planting basin on the street gable end of our house, planted the climbers, transplanted three shrub roses that have been eking out stunted & undernourished lives on much worse soil around the house. Now I have FIVE ROSE BUSHES just outside the yard gate to look at every morning for seven months until the frost sets in. Been waiting for this for ages!
  • Reading the enormously long short story anthology The Weird is really relaxing because it liberates me from two of my reading hangups. 1) There’s no way I will finish it anytime soon, so there’s no reason to press on with it. 2) The stories are unconnected, so I don’t forget bits of the context if I leave it untouched for a week or two.
  • I’ve seen many, many artist’s reconstructions of excavated burials. I don’t recall ever seeing a fat corpse in them.

Tired Of All This Red Tape

I’ve been directing excavations for 27 years. But am unhappy today with the Swedish institutional and legislative system around field archaeology. It is geared toward strict administrative control, toward site preservation, and toward high-quality recording of sites that cannot be avoided during railway and highway projects. All good. But it tends to react with bafflement or even hostility to anyone who wants to make discoveries beyond the quotidian.

Very little archaeological fieldwork in this country is driven primarily by scientific curiosity. Makes me long for the days when Professor Montelius would just show up at the railway station, hire a few farmhands and head straight for the coolest site in the parish. I file my fieldwork reports exceptionally fast and immediately make them globally available online. I ask for no red carpet. Just let me do my thing, because I deliver.

Easter Weekend Fun

Here’s what I did for fun over Easter.

  • Read Philip José Farmer, Michael Chabon and Edith Nesbit
  • Played the boardgames Acquire (Sid Sackson 1963) and Taj Mahal (Reiner Knizia 2000)
  • Sunshine walk with friends
  • Pantsless sunshine gardening
  • RPG prep: The Dark of Hot Springs Island (Jacob Hurst et al. 2017)
  • Geocaching
  • Scrub clearance on my friends’ recently bought property in Almunge

Dear Reader, what did you do for fun?

March Pieces Of My Mind #3

  • That’s odd. Micronauts action figures look way cheaper and sillier to me in 2024 than they did in 1977.
  • What is this test, Oh Knights of– Knights Who ‘Til Recently Said “Ni”?
  • I just think it’s kind of pathetic how these pretty girls will pretend to be into equestrian sports when it’s completely obvious that all they really want is to meet a horse.
  • Reading the PhD thesis of a Boomer colleague who wrote it in the 1970s and then got a lifelong steady lectureship at their home department. It’s a solid piece of work, respect on that account. But it’s only about 95 pages long. Us gen-X academics in the humanities went to uni with completely unrealistic expectations.
  • Why have I not yet become Bey of Tunis? I’m waiting, OK?!
  • Cycled out in the moonlight to the big burial mound near the Sanda road, and as I hoped I got to hear the tawny owl calling. On the way home I barged through two flocks of indolent deer.
  • Tricky to dress for cycling when it’s 1 Celsius. Too heavy and you get super sweaty. Too light and you get cold when you’re off your bike.
  • “So knights are mythical!” said the younger and less experienced dragons. “We always thought so.” J.R.R. Tolkien, Farmer Giles of Ham
  • Farmer Giles has the scene from The Hobbit where Elrond reads inscriptions on ancient swords and identifies them as famous blades. In FGoH it’s the local parson and the sword is Caudimordax, or Tailbiter.
  • I have often switched operating systems on my laptops. I don’t know how to do that on another one of my computers, viz a Samsung Galaxy A22. But the makers of the OS it’s currently running are pushing a new version that is too heavy for the hardware in the machine. Planned obsolescence. Is there a firm in Stockholm that will install the smartphone equivalent of linux on my A22?
  • Bizarre habit in humanities bibliographies: Christina and Thomas are not abbreviated C. and T., but Ch. and Th.
  • Passing the gym in the local mall, I suddenly remembered. That used to be a co-op grocery store. I was a very new dad, wandering the aisles a bit shell-shocked and self-conscious, looking for the baby formula for the first time. My boy is 25 now.
  • Google News’s customised news coverage has figured out that I’m into “gaming”. But it doesn’t understand that I only enjoy live hairy tea-drinking tabletop gaming, not video games. It’s a lot like Facebook’s inability to conceive of a scifi fan who only reads books and watches feature films, no TV series.
  • I was reminded of why I oppose media debates about arts and culture, Sw. kulturdebatt, by this article. These debates are just generally pointless to me and deal with unimportant issues. But here’s a fabulously vapid argument. The writer criticises Spotify, the music streaming service, on the grounds that if you give it no information about your taste and just click on a random playlist on the opening page, you get to hear bland commercial music catering to the lowest common denominator. This is analogous to criticising 1990s record stores because you once went into one, bought a record completely at random, and didn’t like it. With one important difference: 1990s record stores weren’t the size of Greenland, unlike Spotify’s offerings.
  • A confession. I have no idea what the host of “Home workout with Sofia” looks like. But I am not unaffected by her panting when my wife does her morning exercise in the living room.
  • Movie: Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway (2019). Psychedelic Estonian parody and celebration of cheap 70s and 80s action cinema plus The Matrix. Movies just don’t get weirder than this while still being fun to watch. Grade: great!
  • Going to bed at night is time travel towards a morning cup of tea. Death is exactly the same except you can’t tell if there is tea or not. Or a you. Or anything, really.
  • Children are eating Marie crackers in this 1905 novel. The scourge has been upon us for so very long.
  • Dagens ETC, a Swedish Leftie daily newspaper, discusses the recent dramatic divergence in political opinions between men and women under the headline “Men are from YouTube, women are from Instagram”. And it makes me wonder what planet I’m on, because I don’t think anyone regardless of gender should get their political impulses from watching video clips. I use YouTube only when I need to do my tie or learn a complicated boardgame.
  • Today is my 17th anniversary as a happy Linux user! I still barely know any terminal window commands. But I have a stable OS for free, it does all I need it to do, it never gets upgraded past my computers’ strength, and it runs no DRM spyware from Richmond.
  • I’d like to ask all teachers for advice. How can we make Balteusschließe the first noun taught to pupils in middle school German?

March Pieces Of My Mind #2

They lifted Östervik railway bridge to a nearby work platform and refurbished it, and now it’s back looking nice!
  • Previously as spiritual leader of a Christian sect I have taught that prayer is meaningless since God already knows. I am now setting myself up as a Buddhist sage, with the central teaching that all enlightenment is false. Feel like you’ve had a big revelation? Sorry, it’s just a transient neurological event.
  • Woodpeckers don’t mind if you stand under the trees they’re pecking. Hold on to the tree and press your ear against its bark. It’s like nothing else, very intimate!
  • In the Christian Medieval heroic literature of the Insular Celtic area, ancient head-hunting and trophy taking figures large. You know, the Mabinogion etc. But there is very little evidence that it was still practiced. Until the Vikings showed up and started doing really weird shit with severed heads in e.g. Dublin, probably horrifying the people who wrote that heroic literature.
  • It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
  • There’s a fundamental difference between theoreticians in the natural sciences and the humanities. The natural sciences aim to develop better theory. The humanities aim to develop more theory.
  • Russia’s next dictator is out there somewhere. Wonder who it will be.
  • Many Swedish noble families went extinct only one or two generations after they were ennobled. Sometimes because of high infant mortality, sometimes because men were ennobled late in life. Nobility was only inherited along the male line.
  • Reading Mary Roach. Cool info: wild animals are really bad at judging the speed at which something scary approaches. Their flight responses have evolved to trigger on distance, namely the distance at which their home area’s fastest predator can reach them if they don’t get moving. Deer assume that nothing moves faster than a wolf.
  • Churches tend to multiply by division. Each split creates a risk of sectarian enmity. For this reason I kind of like the Swedish Equmenia Church. It was formed in 2011 when the Swedish Methodists, Baptists, Salvation Army and Mission Covenant responded to dwindling membership numbers by putting aside their theological differences and de-splitting. I am quite ignorant about these things, but it seems the move has strengthened and reinvigorated them. I’m happy to game-master at their gaming convention.
  • I’m being unusually ecclesiastical this weekend. Yesterday game-mastering in a dissenter church, today listening to my wife’s choir in the former state church.
  • Not only is the 20th century in the past, we’ve gone through nearly a quarter of the 21st as well.
  • This interests me. There’s a classical orchestra in Stockholm, founded in 2005, that is not a public institution but a joint-stock company, Sw. aktiebolag. They’ve been commercially viable for 19 years and counting. Most rock bands aren’t.
  • Movie: Odd Man Out (1947). Irish resistance leader kills a man during a robbery to fund his movement, also gets shot himself, spends most of movie stumbling around faint and delirious from blood loss. Gorgeous cinematography. Funny supporting characters. Grade: OK.
  • Major new paper in preprint on the population genetics of northern Europe after the arrival of the steppe Indo-Europeans. I’m reading it with huge interest. A few highlights: a) the Langobards started as migrants from Scandinavia, b) so did the Wielbark Culture in northern Poland that we have been identifying with the early Goths — but, c) in a development few had foreseen, by the time the late Goths show up speaking Germanic in southern Europe, they don’t have significant genetic continuity with northern Poland any more. The historical Goths are genetically a bunch of south European Scandy LARPers!
  • Please, anyone who peer-reviews this paper, make them use BC/AD dates! Nobody in any field refers to the start of the Viking Period as “1200 BP”. BP dates are reserved for uncalibrated radiocarbon dates, which nobody in archaeology or history uses after c. 4000 cal BC.
  • McColl et al. have made a naming mistake in the preprint. Their “East Scandinavian” genetic group only reaches the Swedish east coast after AD 1. Prior to that it focuses on North Jutland, the Danish Isles and Västergötland, while the Swedish east coast is full of people in the catch-all “Other” category. It should be renamed the Kattegat group.
  • And he said unto them, “Hate not the religious person, hate religion!”
  • Despite the incorrect spelling in the books, it is quite clear that the Harkonnens are not just generally evil, corrupt and greedy. Specifically they are a Finnish family with evil, corrupt and greedy habits. The originator of their line was Santeri Härkönen (1934-2006), an insurance claims adjuster in Oulu.
  • It drives me absolutely nuts… When people end every single sentence in a paragraph with three periods… Or even four periods…. Or bizarrely with a row of colons ::::: Makes me want to shake them by the shoulders and shout GET A GRIP ON YOURSELF YOU LANGUID INDECISIVE STONER…
  • Yes, language changes constantly. No, you can’t use this fact to argue that the particular errors you make when writing are OK and everybody will write that way 20 years from now. You’re just making the Galileo Argument.
  • Hey blood donors, if you’ve ever had constipation trouble from the iron replacement pills — did you know that it is not only OK but actually encouraged to space out the dosage over a longer time, like one pill every third night?
  • On my daily constitutional bike ride I came across a young cat near Tattby where I went to school for six years. When I made the mouse noise to catch its attention it ran up to me and demanded cuddles, duly delivered.
  • In the first eleven pages of Telegraph Avenue, Chabon introduces at least twelve named characters that seem worth keeping track of. I’m keeping notes.
  • My wife and I are very disappointed with this weather, snow and overcast in mid-March. And we feel that Blomsterlandet, the local garden centre, should be made to answer for this. It’s just not right that they can advertise and sell gardening supplies all year round, and then it snows in mid-March. We’re thinking of filing a complaint with the Consumer Protection Board.
  • Listening to Bach’s 1724 St. John Passion as preparation for hearing a live performance on Sunday. Funny how Jesus is sung by a bass here, a really macho one on this recording, creating a contrast with the energetic tenor Evangelist. We’re used to images of pale wimpy Jesus and monk-like evangelists, but here they’re both super powerful. Imagine Isaac Hayes and Rob Halford singing every second verse on an uptempo song.
  • Searching for a translation of Paul the Deacon’s History of the Lombards, I find Becoming Carole Lombard: stardom, comedy, and legacy by Olympia Kiriakou 2021.
  • I don’t know what you people are reading, but in this P.J. Farmer novel here, aliens have just fed LSD chewing gum to Sir Richard Francis Burton and Alice in Wonderland, and they’re fucking.
  • Because of weird throat architecture I can’t swallow pills whole or they get stuck. So, having a minor dental problem, I now have to chomp six hefty pills of amazingly vile-tasting penicillin every day for a week. I do it with oatmeal but it’s still awful every time. /-:

Guided Improv in Brindlewood Bay

I enjoy game-mastering intricate investigative scenarios like the ones published for Delta Green and Gumshoe games (of the latter, I’ve run a lot of Ashen Stars and Swords of the Serpentine). These can’t be improvised on the fly, any more than an Agatha Christie whodunnit can be improvised as an extempore oral performance. Good GMs can improvise a simple swashbuckling, goblin-exterminating session though to great effect.

2010’s Apocalypse World has been hugely influential in creating the sprawling PbtA family of RPGs – “Powered by the Apocalypse”. Reading its rulebook though, I realised that it has neither scenarios nor a pre-described world. You just start with the concept of “after the Apocalypse”, some survivors and a shelter where they live, and then everything is improvised in collaboration between the GM and the players.

This made me recoil in horror. Remember, solid investigative scenarios can’t be improvised at all, and only good GMs can improvise a good swashbuckling scenario. Apocalypse World invites the players, most of whom typically aren’t GMs at all, to improvise stories. All I can say is no thanks, unless everyone’s a talented storyteller, preferably with an MA in ecology or agricultural economics!

In fact, I have a deep distrust in the average GM’s and player’s ability to improvise anything worthwhile. It reminds me of why I was never into cyber sex even in my youth. It’s improvised pornography written by amateurs, and it’s mostly just dreary.

I have however recently run our first session of a PbtA game, Brindlewood Bay (2023). This is an actual Agatha Christie whodunnit game! With some improvisation! But it is different from Apocalypse World in an important respect: it has prewritten scenarios. And where the improvisation comes in is funny.

Every scenario provides a murder to solve, a few potential suspects and a list of somewhat vague clues. But it doesn’t tell you whodunnit or how the clues fit together. As a GM you hand clues out to the players in response to their inquiries, and then it’s their job to put a case together and point to a suspect. They roll some dice, and their chance of success depends on how many clues they’ve incorporated. Neat! In all investigative games, I enjoy listening to my smart players discussing the clues they’ve gathered and what they mean. With Brindlewood Bay, it turns out that this is fun even when I myself don’t know the answer to the riddle.