LinCon 2024

After skipping LinCon 2023, I went back to Linköping for my tenth convention over the past Ascension weekend. As usual I played some boardgames (Barcelona, Evolution) and attended the auction. But also I heard a lecture by Swen Österberg on the 40-year history of LinCon.

Most importantly to me, I game-mastered at the convention for the first time: three four-hour sessions of Swords of the Serpentine. This is a 2022 table-top role-playing game of mystery-solving in a fantasy version of Venice. All fifteen participants were great to game with and we had a lot of fun together! I hope to game-master at more conventions in the future.

Here are my impressions of LinCon 2022.

April Pieces Of My Mind #3

Białowieża Forest
  • Apparently Uncle Vladimir has found some sensational new source material that demonstrates that the Katyn Massacres were’t perpetrated by the Russians, after all! I guess the official Russian acceptance of responsibility in 1990 was simply incorrect.
  • I know several guys who have had way more sex than many famous rock stars. These men have probably outfucked Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones by a lot. Their method? I bet you’d like to know… OK, here’s the trick: instead of dying at 27, you get married, and then you enjoy conjugal relations with your lady wife a couple of times a week for several decades!
  • Call me an extremist, but I really don’t think Semitic-speaking monotheist civilians in the East Mediterranean should be mass-murdered by terrorists or the military.
  • The Palm Tree Building in Łódź opened in 1956 and preserves trees that had previously grown in the private green houses of industrialists and Czarist officials. The glass building has repeatedly been expanded to accommodate growing trees, until nothing remains of the 1950s structure. But the tallest trees are still in their original places.
  • My friend asked me to play boardgames on 1 May. Unusually for me, I had to reply “Sorry, I’ll be protesting against the government most of Wednesday”.
  • Dude contacts me because he’s watched a YouTube clip and has picked up some folk pseudohistory about his home area. Shows me his family tree which has him descending from a fictional regional ruler. When I tell him I think that’s just imagination, he asks me to explain why I “assume” so. “Hello professional research scholar, please deliver a detailed critique of the amateur theory I believe in.” I just blocked him, can’t be bothered, not my job.
  • Bong is a Swedish brand for canned soup. Can you smoke a bong when it’s filled with pork & pea soup?
  • For all of you who play a lot of the 1984 video game The Ancient Art of War, here’s an exploit. Military units have a fatigue number that is independent of their size. When you combine two units, they all get the fatigue number of the first unit you specify. So prior to a battle, just drop off one guy as a unit of his own. Send the other 39 into battle, which makes them fatigued, then add them back to the single guy’s non-fatigued unit. Boom, everybody’s fresh again.
  • My buddy donated his Landrover to the Ukrainian army. The other day they sent him a picture of what it looked like after a Russian drone hit it. Everybody travelling in the car survived, thanks to a quick manoeuvre that caused the thing to explode under the Landrover, not inside it. But the driver suffered several broken bones.
  • Got five gigs lined up in May: Siena Root, Acid King, Norlin & Teglund, Mick Harvey, Year of the Goat.
  • Having listened to a documentary about Salman Rushdie, I feel moved to express what I believe is the majority position in Scandinavia. To whit, that all gods and devils are fictional characters, there is no afterlife, and you might as well pray to Bilbo Baggins.

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?