Aardvarchaeology – by Dr. Martin Rundkvist – Scandinavian archaeology, history, skepticism, books and music

Gigs of 2025

Barely more than half of last years’ number, because of my shaky finances. Almost entirely Scandy acts!

Soul Pack at Music Box
Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory at Fållan
Baroque music in the German Church: Partes from Kiev and the cembalist Mariangiola Martello from Stockholm
Spiral Skies + Ström + Bullet at Strand (the latter were a truly awesome double bill!)
Motorpsycho at Stadsgårdsterminalen
Vokalensemblen Alicia at Uppenbarelsekyrkan (twice)
West African drum group at Fisksätra International Festival
Den Der Hale + Trettioåriga kriget (dammit, this finally gave me tinnitus after four decades of gigs)
Thundermother + Crown Electric at Strand
Ola Aurell at Södra Teatern

Here’s my 2024 gig list.

December Pieces Of My Mind #2

Temple hill and modified sea stack at Terracina

I’m working on a study of Bronze Age axes, and I find it a little hard to articulate why. I don’t get paid. Another journal paper won’t make any difference for my employability at this stage. Almost nobody knows or cares that these axes exist. I think the main reasons I do this are: It’s fun. I’m one of the few who can do this well. I’ve dedicated my life to expanding our scientific knowledge.
Advice for young scholars. You may not get every €4000 grant you apply for from small private foundations. But you’ll get a few, which means that the hourly wage of writing all those applications is astronomical. And they may be what lets you stay in the humanities game long enough to remain there.
Give me principled politicians who are happy to antagonise large voter demographics when the voters stray. A decent political party teaches the voters an ideology, not the other way around
Very pleased with myself: turns out that somehow I simply know how to cook rice on a gas stove. My picky Chinese wife approves it.
Wonder how far north in Italy the line between mostly single-glazed and mostly double-glazed windows runs. Being a Scandy born post-WW2, I consider single glazing a sign of extreme backwardness.
I hope the greater acceptance for online meetings after the pandemic will decrease business flying. It seems hard to get people to stop flying on vacation though.
We’ve learned about two sizeable immigrant communities here in Terracina. One is small business owners from India. The other is retired Norwegians, many with a background in the movie industry. I don’t know how much contact the two groups have.
I like the card in a deck that carries info about the card factory.
Hear me out. The otak that shelters in Ged’s cloak in A Wizard of Earthsea. Surely this must be Brown Jenkin who has gotten lost on an interdimensional jaunt?
Caught myself agonising over an embarrassing interaction with someone years and years ago, when I’ve had lots of interactions with them since that were fine. 🙄
I return from Italy energetic and ready for fun. I have very few plans for 2026. I just told my wife that she’s pretty much my main plan.
I look forward to some sunny days with freezing temperatures, maybe in January. Skiing, skating. The next ten days in Stockholm won’t offer a single dip below zero Celsius. Several days of drizzle. At least we’re out of the really steep part of the sinus wave, where we lost half an hour of daily daylight in one week.
It’s tragicomical to hear white supremacists claim that everything worthwhile in history was achieved by white Europeans (which is not true), when they themselves have not personally achieved anything in particular beyond being born with a certain skin tone. White supremacy is a consolation prize for working men left at the wayside by globalised capitalism.
With Teheran slated for abandonment in the near future for reasons of climate change, could the Iranian government please become a vocal international proponent of decisive action?
Today’s twelve years since China landed a stationary lander and a small rover, Chang’e 3 & Yutu, on the Moon. Both fully functional. In May of 2021 they had similar success with a similar pair of devices on Mars. The US Republican administration is now drastically de-funding planetary science missions like these. Because their leader is a very old person who thinks people in space suits on TV are what’s cool, like in 1969.
This made me laugh. In Helen Wecker’s 2021 novel The Hidden Palace ch. 5, a little girl tries reading the Talmud in order to get closer to her emotionally unavailable dad. “At first, reading it was like listening to a group of people all shouting at one another.”
Roskilde University suffers political attack from the extreme right AND the social democrats. Why? Because RUC has been too successful in attracting tuition-paying Bangladeshi students and their spouses. Not uneducated rural grandmothers or drug dealers, but people with money and a desire for higher education in the West. Scandinavia needs more smart young people and fewer (uneducated, rural) fascist voters. Regardless of skin tone.
I just realised that I need to dig trial trenches in the Centralbadet park. There’s a Medieval village under it.
I loved the first Avatar movie. I liked the second one. I’m skipping the third one.
Thought I’d been scammed out of €158 when I saw this specification on my account: “GOOGLE *Google Play Ap g.co/help” Investigation showed that in fact, this gobbledigook represents a one-year digital subscription to Le Monde.
Added up what the train tickets Stockholm — Monte San Biagio — Stockholm cost us. SEK 5200 = €476 per person. Plus two hotel nights, one on the way out and one on the way back.
Today’s when I start moving my files from Google in the untrustworthy US to Proton in stolid Switzerland. If Switzerland also becomes hostile to the EU one day, as seems highly unlikely, then they’re likely to be the good guys.
The “Conservative” Swedish government is bribing Somali officials to accept unwanted Somali citizens. Our authorities have now grudgingly admitted that of the 34 people whom the government are paying to get rid of, only 4 or less have any criminal convictions. But the minister in charge has framed the whole thing as a way to get rid of hardened criminals. (Via Dagens ETC.)
Listening to ROADMAP, Roy Zimmerman’s new album of old resistance songs, and I keep getting weepy. But can’t keep from thinking that The People he sings to are fascist voters these days. Dictatorship by means of universal suffrage.
I know somebody who needs to apply for welfare. And it struck me that it’s like a job interview but backwards. You need to convince that social worker that you are absolutely helpless, wildly incompetent, that you are definitely not someone that can be counted on.
The Imaginary Worlds podcast has a great episode out with funny interviews with Christmas folklore beings who have been eclipsed by the Coca Cola Santa!
Hey, academic employers. Thirteen minutes apart, I just received two PDFs. One is the proofs of my own forthcoming paper in Praehistorische Zeitschrift, one of the highest-ranked German journals in my discipline. The other is a manuscript I’m reviewing for the highest-ranked English journal. I think you should hire me.
Two municipal council politicians from the Swedish Fascist Party, Frej Dristig and Niclas Ahlberg, write a debate piece for the local newspaper where they try to get a public library to cancel an event with two immigrant authors. Because these two have on occasion criticised the Fascist Party! This level of ignorance of basic freedoms is appalling. Also I wonder what the newspaper editor was thinking. The Writers’ Union of course went ballistic.
Oh man, I love Kraftwerk
A member of the Stockholm Tolkien Society’s Dance Guild once invented the Medieval dance style Full Contact Farandole.
Is the current price jump on RAM memory also raising the prices on the used laptop market?
German game designer and mathematician Reiner Knizia’s classic card game High Society from 1995 is constantly being reissued in beautiful new editions. My friend Marcus and I have just offered to organise a friendly tournament in this simple but extremely ingenious game at the LinCon gaming convention in May.
In other news, the Swedish professional class is still perpetuating itself, reinvesting and enlarging its generational academic and cultural capital. My tech-school daughter needed a couple of more hours today in one of the local library’s study rooms. So she called me and I booked the room on my library card.
Imagine telling someone in 1900 that yeah, we have sex without a thought about babies or marriage, and anybody can study to be an archbishop even if they haven’t got any money. In Scandinavia, that is.
Hey Americans, did you know that in Scandinavia we don’t even understand what “trust fund” or “putting our kids through college” means? Because everybody gets government-subsidised study loans, and there’s no tuition fees.
My wife told me she’s lost weight during our stay in Italy. I replied, “It’s OK baby, I want you anyway”.
First major problem with Proton. You know how they proclaim proudly that the communication between your machine and their server is securely encrypted? This means that it takes a lot of computation power to handle large files. And my current computer hasn’t got much power. A 42,000 word text document that Google Docs handles just fine (since it doesn’t encrypt communications) causes Proton to just freeze up.
Why. Don’t. People. Check. Why don’t they check if a Wikipedia article already contains the information on their minds before they add a chunk to it?
Hey progrock heads. You need to check out the Finnish band Saimaa! ❤️
Had dinner with younger daughter who told me about all the societies, carnival floats and amateur musicals she’s involved with in Lund. Meanwhile, older daughter is rehearsing a play in Stockholm. ❤️
Love reading scenarios for session prep. Hate reading rules for session prep. I can barely get through the rules for the famously light Mountain Witch.
When prepping a scenario, I always find out what the weather and temperature are likely to be, as well as the timing of sunrise and sunset. For The Mountain Witch, I’ve collected the information online for the town of Gotemba east of Mount Fuji.

December Pieces Of My Mind #1

Ramsay Campbell’s retrospective short story collection for 1961 to 1991 opens with a strange editorial selection. It’s a piece of juvenilia from when he was 15. It’s good for a school boy, but it’s not good. Can’t see what they put that in there.
Yeah baby, we are heading for a latitude with a 2:40 longer day than in depressing Stockholm! 139% daylight!
Post-1250 Swedish, today’s standard, has been described as a creole language created by children in Hanseatic towns. They spoke either Old Norse or Plattdeutsch at home and had to talk to each other. Medieval Swedish towns had two mayors, one for each big nationality.
Loutish young fellows drinking beer in the train cafeteria at noon on a Saturday. When buying another round they held out their collected credit cards to the barman like fanned playing cards, and asked him to draw one at random.
Freiburg im Breisgau is named thus because they give you free burgers and they’re made from brisket. It’s a great place!
What a lucky man I am, to get along so well with my wife after over 26 years together! We are always particularly happy when travelling. ❤️
Stockholm – Terracina, 42 hrs
Many literature scholars believe that new interpretations of a work are valuable, the more the better. It is possible to enrich the work with additional interpretations. In the 80s some influential English archaeologists said that ancient artefacts are like text, so let’s just create lots of interpretations. But most archaeologists believe that our job is to trim away erroneous interpretations and find out the truth about what people did in the past. Interpretations are cheap.
Imagine back when being a hack writer was a viable career. Today you can’t even support yourself being a skillful writer.
Strangely and impractically, many Italian front doors have no state where you are outside, the door is closed and it is unlocked. It’s either open or locked. Seems designed on the assumption that Grandma is always home and will let you in.
Suddenly I wonder: why did my primary school buddy’s movement-impaired grandma live in their murky basement garage, and not in one of the well-lit rooms up in their big house? I think she took all her meals down there too. Can it have been her son-in-law who grudgingly let her live there? Maybe there was no shower up on the ground floor. Anyway, bizarre.
The space heater here has an incomprehensible thermostat. It isn’t graded in numbers, just in bigger and smaller dots. When you set the thermostat, you have no way of knowing what absolute value you’ve chosen. Just whether it’s hotter or colder relative to yesterday. A lot or a little? No way to know. Boggles the mind.
The Italian grocery chain CONAD should be named Conrad’s Gonads.
About the National Guard being sent to Democrat-dominated US cities that don’t want them. Imagine if this was the EU. And Brussels tried to send unwanted troops to Rome or Madrid. The EU would fall apart immediately.
The first helicopter prototype flew in 1939.
Went uphill into the dense, low woods, found some porcupine quills. The crested porcupine is common in Italy!
There’s a lot of boar hunting in these hills, but the spent ammo you see is shot, some of it fine calibre. So I guess they’re hunting birds. Wonder if any of them are edible or if it’s just moronic killing for sport. I support hunting for the pot, it’s ethical meat.
My trans daughter is texting me to ask if there’s nail polish remover in the house.
Things that I have opted out of that help me stay an uncomprehending and slightly nauseous spectator versus humanity at large: TV, alcohol, LLMs, spectator sports, YouTube, religion
When I mustered for the military, I took the tests and then became a conscientious objector. But they told me they would have made me a crypto officer. I’ve been thinking that must be like a crypto-communist: an officer who commands secretly. And now, decades later, I read Vonnegut’s Sirens, and it has secret military officers!
The Conservative-led Swedish government has been caught bribing Somali officials to accept certain unwanted Somali nationals when Sweden kicks them out. Now we find that there isn’t even any official record of who this money is ostensibly intended as salaries for. All because the government is dependent on the Fascist party for its mandate.
Should Black Sabbath’s bass player be understood primarily as a geezer or as a butler?
Another example of people just not being cut out for life in a hi-tech society. Another case for people not being able to handle choice. Fast fashion and easy returns causes companies to trash unused clothing and electronics for 21.7 billion euros annually, just in the EU. They over-produce cheap products with a short cycle of fashionability, trash the ones that don’t get sold, and make a profit.
Re-reading A Wizard Of Earthsea after at least 35 years, and I remember nothing, and the associative links I make now are completely different from in my teens. So yeah, I’m basically reading this amazing book for the first time. Again.
There has been no additional data since 1962 on the scientific issue of what happens when you inject an elephant with an enormous dose of LSD.
I kind of feel like there’s at least one country on Earth that definitely shouldn’t engage in genocide. At least one particular one.
I used to stare at Photoshop’s splash screen and wonder what Vinod Balakrishnan and Seetharaman Narayanan were doing at that exact moment.
All the other Slavic speakers: Come on, our dear Polish cousins, you can’t pronounce L like W, it’s ridiculous. Polish people: ŁATCH US & ŁEEP
Sparrowhawk’s home island Gont measures 50 miles = 80 kilometres in diameter. It’s roughly the size of Trinidad. The inhabitants live in towns and villages. They work bronze but not iron.
Wait a minute, Ursula. They haven’t got ironworking. But the Port of Gont is full of great houses and towers of cut stone. So they have stone cutting and mortar masonry, which implies limestone kilns. OK, moving on…
Being nerdy means being different. I’ve always taken this to mean that nerdy people need to support ethnic and sexual minorities as a matter of course.
Proofread a paper today that I submitted three years ago. Conference proceedings volumes often take ages to come out, apparently because there’s no money to pay the editorial team with, so they have to work in drips and drops. I don’t quite know why we keep producing these volumes. Neither the editorial work nor writing the papers themselves counts for anything worth mentioning in annual performance evals.
The European Space Agency’s new budget is the largest in its history. Its 23 member states have pledged 22 billion euros (more than 25 billion USD) for the next three years of programs — a 32% increase over the previous cycle. ❤️ (Via the Planetary Society.)
Hard-won game master tip 1: never perform dialogue between two non-player characters. Just summarise the exchange.
Hard-won game master tip 2: never have someone describe a locality to the player characters over the phone. This just puts an intermediate game master between you and the players. Have that person say, “I’m not comfortable describing our premises over the phone, but I will be happy to see you here at three o’clock.”
Did you know — most of the big words that have become linked with H.P. Lovecraft were specialist technical terms before his time. Squamous and rugose are from botany. Cyclopean masonry is a type of Mycenaean wall from the 2nd Millennium BC. The Old Ones are the Romans. The Old Gods are the Graeco-Roman ones. Chthonian refers to Greek deities of the earth and of caves. So any cyclopean structure is about 3500 years old and built by Greeks.
I’m going to get rich popularising a new musical genre, White Powerlessness Music. It’s sad songs for banjo, accordion and scaled-down drum kit. Lyrics emphasise feelings of hopelessness and resignation and a heartfelt conviction that poorly educated white men have very little to contribute to society. Many songs list and describe more successful ethnic groups, and express admiration and longing for their members.
The town architects and archaeologists of Terracina made use of a 1943 Allied bombing raid to create Roman ruin sites in the Old Town. They tore down the damaged Medieval buildings selectively, leaving all the Roman masonry and stonework in place. When you see uncovered ruins in towns, there has almost always been something sitting on top of them until recently. That’s why they are often in pits.
One thing that a career in archaeology will cure you of is any fear of human remains. I like to think of them like seashells on the beach. Also the durable remains of something that used to be alive.
I miss editorial gatekeeping so bad. I remember a time when crooks and morons didn’t have access to mass media. They make me want to opt out of consuming media entirely.
Oh, the burn. Here, getting a bestseller sticker on your book from the German news mag Der Spiegel is described as “the tramp stamp of literature”. Because the award has been badly gamed. 😄
The 1st time I heard Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” was in 1988 when Levi’s used it in a TV commercial. I’d barely heard any blues at all before. I was impressed by this almost atavistically powerful music. What I didn’t know was that the recording I heard was only 15 years old. This was the murderously heavy version produced for Muddy Waters in 1973 by Johnny Winter, who is heard shouting “Yeah!” in the background with an echo effect that makes him sound like he’s locked up in the bathroom.
I’m not an enemy of the people. I’m just an enemy of Fascist voters. I think you’re all sad fucks who should be ashamed of yourselves and never visit a polling station again.
Yay! My 2019 book has just been cited in a Catalan journal as an example of a research trend focusing on daily life at Medieval castles. Written Catalan is surprisingly easy to understand.
All modern people need to be deported to the volcanic island of Surtsey, where they can’t damage the archaeological record. Because Surtsey rose above the sea in 1967, so it’s guaranteed to have no archaeology.
LinkedIn. So depressing. Intense feeling of unreality, and not in a fun surrealist way.
I don’t understand how anyone can take part in a survey of the best books of 2025. I don’t really read new books. This year I’ve read nothing published in 2025, only three books from 2024. And six books from before WW2.
There can’t be many Medieval towns whose labyrinthine alleyways are so completely touristified as Old Sperlonga’s. Everything is sanitised and recently painted in a consistent colour scheme. Every door is a shop, a restaurant or a holiday home. There is no sign of any native inhabitants. They wouldn’t recognise the place.
My dad used to work with market segmentation studies in advertising. “Do not mail your knitting yarn catalogue to teenage boys” etc. He told me I’m in the hopeless and worthless marketing segment that is best ignored. Anti-consumerist, environmentally conscious, ascetic, hostile to ostentatious luxury consumption. I see it as a badge of honour. Fuck “the economy”!
Expenses that I’m deferring until I’m back on a salary: A used laptop, A second pair of pyjamas, Asking my buddy to make me a hexagon map of an inundated Stockholm for a role-playing game
Downloading excerpts of ebooks is great. Tonight I’ve tried two. One was so bad that I deleted the excerpt before finishing it. One was so good that I bought the whole book after reading only a few pages.
How’s the fetish for 1970s football outfits doing these days at gay dress code clubs?
I’m all for the part of revolutionary politics where they make billionaires live in constant fear for their possessions. I’m just not on board for the part where you end up with an unelected dictatorship of former revolutionaries. I think my position is “reform socialism”. I trust neither the capitalists nor your revolution. But sadly I’ve learned not to trust voters either. So we’re fucked.
Haha, awesome. There’s been this looong debate over why Neanderthals had such wide noses. New paper demonstrates that they had normal nose width compared to other hominids AND to modern humans! Only not to modern Europeans! 😄 (Via the Common Descent Podcast.)
I am shocked and appalled by the United States’ new fascist defence doctrine regarding Europe. Putinist traitor in the White House enabled by 77 million shithead voters. Complete disgrace.
Oh, so the economic plight of the White American worker is down to decades of previous policymaking? How sad. But then who were the utter idiots who voted for those obviously damaging policies?
I read a little about chemsex orgies. What a fantastically unappealing idea. There are few voluntary pastimes I would be more keen to avoid.

Today marks my first 20 years of blogging. It hasn’t been a fashionable medium in a long time. But blogging is far from dead, and I still enjoy it immensely. As I have often commented here, being able to publish anything I like straight to a readership without any editorial oversight is great.

With the major groundswell of resistance lately to the large social media platforms, RSS readers have become a big thing again. And you can read this blog just fine on those:

https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/feed/

If I can have a wish on this first-score birthday of my blogging, then it will be for more reader engagement. More on-topic comments, more questions, more requests. Because I am going to keep doing this. So you, Dear Reader, might as well make use of your opportunities to influence what I write!

November Pieces Of My Mind #3

Hey ladies, if you feel like you’re kind of reaching for reasons to marry me, at least there’s this: I cook a nice coq au vin.
The Oak Island Money Pit is on Google Maps.
Sweden is a multi-party democracy with proportional representation, so I’ve always lived with the idea that there are people who have very different political opinions than me. I never saw them as stupid or evil, just misguided. With the rise of the fascist party over the past 15 years though, I have come to a very different position. I’m violently disgusted by these voters and politicians. I don’t want to be a citizen of the same country as them. They are beyond the pale of basic decency.
One of the reasons that Late Bronze Age stone axes are confusing is that some are tall and narrow like a modern axe, others are wide and flat, but all have their edge parallel with the haft, just like a modern axe.
I’m not extremely bad at partying. I’m a pretty good guest since I’m outgoing, socially fearless and a good conversationalist. The problem is that though my social skills are solid, my social motivation is weak. I have many activity-based friendships, but I absolutely dread shared passivity. People say that with alcohol this becomes easier. I wouldn’t know.
A lot of the most disappointing behavior seen in politicians has to do with them adapting to popular opinion and factual beliefs. This is one of the reasons that I could never become a successful politician. I absolutely despise the level of knowledge and insight among voters. I want government by experts who ignore popular opinion. I share very few of Emmanuel Macron’s opinions. But I respect his total disregard for what the voters think after they’ve elected him.
Udo Kier has died, aged 81. I enjoyed his 2022 movie Swan Song!
It’s been a year now since I started scanning the university job ads around Northern Europe again, like I did every three weeks from 2003 to 2017. In this time there have been three jobs I could realistically apply for, and I did. The only kinds of job I’m strongly qualified for is as uni professor or non-fic editor, neither of which is a thriving business with any real labour demand.
I have a long-standing plan for how I’m going to start a coercive Christian cult where everything is focused entirely on nonsensical bible verses that have nothing to do with religious or spiritual matters. Everyone must e.g. believe that: “He said to them, ‘What kind of man was he who came up to meet you and spoke these words to you?’ They answered him, ‘He was a hairy man with a leather girdle bound about his loins.'” (2 Kings 1:7). No bible verse that mentions JHWH or Jesus will be permissible in my cult.
Small interview study looks into why many immigrants to Sweden don’t vote in general elections. One common reply was “I don’t know enough about Swedish politics to make an informed choice.” That’s admirable, but you know what? NO SUCH CONSIDERATIONS ARE STOPPING EQUALLY IGNORANT PEOPLE FROM VOTING FOR THE FASCISTS WHO WANT TO KICK YOU OUT.
Four weeks to the solstice, and we’re spending more than half of that time in Italy! Fuck November!
Movie: Vermiglio (2024). South Tirol 1944. Italian deserters from German battlefields hide in barns, are fed by the local populace, get sweet with peasant girls. Grade: OK.
Guess it’s a clear sign of a privileged situation. But I’m considerably more bothered about being superfluous in my chosen professional field than about not having any foreseeable income half a year from now.
You know histograms? Where you divide your data series into buckets of equal width and make a bar chart of how many units are in each bucket. I just discovered an automatic histogram function in Google Sheets. It allowed me to have a quick look at the length of the stone axes in the database I’m putting together, suggesting that this parameter may be bimodal. LibreOffice hasn’t got histograms. Excel does.
I wonder what we will all call the 2020s machine learning applications once people realise that they aren’t intelligent.
Is there a Scandy firm that will jailbreak my 2022 Samsung phone, install an open-source operating system on it and send it back to me? I’ve fucking had it with these obviously over-demanding operating system versions that they push out to make phones sluggish for no other reason than planned obsolesence.
The children of poorly educated MAGA voters deserve good healthcare too. But they are the ones that are mostly going to be denied vaccines and die needlessly of preventable diseases. Idiocracy.
I submitted my translated collection of Edith Nesbit’s ghost stories 11 months ago. It is currently with the graphic designer and will be published some time in Jan – Feb – March. The title is En natt i lusthuset, “A Night in the Pavilion”, after the story titled simply “The Pavilion” in the original. On the scientific side, I’ve got big paper about Vendel Period animal art in Zealand and Scania coming out soon in Praehistorische Zeitschrift. Apart from that, my future is uncertain.
Funny how much less depressing late January is than late November, even though both periods are equally far from the solstice and has equally short days. It’s because from 21-28 November we lose 27 mins of daylight in Stockholm. From 21-28 January we gain 31 mins.
In the past month there have been outpourings of grief from gen-X-ers over the deaths of the lead guitarist from early Kiss and the bass player from the Stone Roses and Primal Scream. And I remember being vaguely aware in the ’90s of newspaper articles about recently deceased giants of jazz, who meant nothing to me.

November Pieces Of My Mind #2

I have taken to looking once monthly at the LinkedIn feed. And every time I have this deep sense of not caring at all about the kind of work most people do to support themselves.
Fung-Wong is a great name for a typhoon. It’s the comic-strip sound effect of when a car or a small house comes flying past you.
The first commercially available RPG, D&D 1.0, cost U$D 10 in 1974. That’s about $65.5 = €57 = SEK 620 today. But it was massively multiplayer.
“Just An Illusion” is a great song despite its idiotically simple and colossally unfunky drum machine beat.
The cult of veterans and war dead is part of how the military reproduces itself. If veterans were universally shunned, there would be no armies one generation later. Veterans should be pitied, not venerated. Because most wars are not just, and most war casualties are pointless.
Let’s be frank. Who among us can truthfully say that we’ve never brought billions of our subjects to Earth in space ships that look like 1950s airliners, stacked them around volcanoes and nuked them to death? I think we should cut “evil” space emperor Xenu some slack. I don’t deny that he may have done what the Scientologists claim he did. But it was another time. Are you really comfortable with throwing the first stone here?
You know what makes you really good at giving lectures, managing work teams and doing job interviews? Years of game mastering.
Apparently frustrated by my unwillingness to re-train as a sheet-metal roofer, the Employment Agency now offers me a course to become a kitchen porter, Sw. måltidsbiträde. This position is more prestigious than a dishwasher!
Peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. This is what comes of attending Kindergarten in 70s Connecticut.
Oligarchs having lots of kids is actually good, because it leads to decreased wealth concentration when they die.
A memory: when I re-melted poorly painted pewter toy soldiers, the paint floated as a slaggy film on the surface of the shiny liquid metal.
Spalting, Sw. blåved, wood that is discoloured but not structurally weakened by fungi. My grandpa liked to do fine woodworking in spalted wood in the 70s. I think it may have been a fad at the time in Sweden.
I’m just here to have fun with my loved ones. And create an assload of fun research publications.
Just got two emails. One encouraged me to go shopping on Black Friday. The other offered to show me NHL hockey matches. There must have been some misunderstanding. I belong to a demographic that would be ecstatic if Black Friday never occurred again, and if we never heard one more word about spectator sports for the rest of our lives.
Been interviewed and then passed over for jobs at two municipal museums this year. Both interviews went well. I’m clearly almost the kind of person a small museum wants. But the Scandy labour market for archaeology-adjacent jobs is always over-saturated. Sweden has one MA programme in Scandy archaeology for every 1.3 million inhabitants. That’s like if China had 1067 archaeology programmes. They have not.
Huge South Korean video game company starts buying out their own staff with huge severance fees, because they expect to use machine learning to do these people’s work in the future. Anyone at their Korean offices who has worked for them for at least 11 years can leave today with three years’ salary. They’re paying to get rid of their in-house talent and expertise. Good luck with that.
“Removal of ergot bodies is done by placing the yield in a brine solution; the ergot bodies float, while the healthy grains sink.”
Around 1500, European fortifications switch from masonry walls around the keep to earthen bastions that can stop a cannonball. The Japanese in the 1500s think differently. They build a rectangular earthen mound and put the castle keep on top. It’s basically a huge motte, like in Europe around 1100 but bigger.
It’s a consolation that I never have to eat kiwi fruit, grapefruit or carambola.
I have great sympathy with people who have a weakness for gambling. I also think gambling is a ridiculous idea just on the face of it. We make an agreement, we roll some dice, and now I owe you a thousand dollars? Huh. No. Let’s play a designer boardgame for no real-world stake at all.
I just learned the official Swedish definition of “long-term unemployed”. It’s 27 weeks or more. I recently became long-term unemployed, Sw. långtidsarbetslös.
So annoying with members of fringe religious groups who camp 24/7 on the Wikipedia article about their group. You’re dealing with someone who is fanatically invested, possibly even paid a salary, in giving the article a positive spin. Yourself, you’re zipping around working on lots of subjects and make no particular priority of that one article.
Fucking humans. Tribal, greedy and corrupt. I can’t stand them.
Wow. You just can’t make this shit up. TIL that in April of 1919, Munich was a Socialist splinter republic, and Adolf Hitler was one of its low-level functionaries. (He celebrated his 30th birthday in the republic.) Its armed forces executed seven members of the Thule Society and one Jewish art professor.
Told my wife that the leader of a notorious 90s Nazi rock band, Pluton Svea, died the other day. She wasn’t listening very attentively. Her reply: “Uhuh, really, so did you use to listen to them?” 😬
My youngest is vigorously involved as an organiser in the engineering-student social scene in Lund, and certainly not straight edge in relation to alcohol. But she told us about having to tell another girl, “Can you please stop badgering me to drink more?” The girl replied, apparently in all seriousness, “I just don’t know why anyone would prefer to be sober at any time?” Poor kid.
My dad read only yachting magazines when I was a kid. I remember him reading only one single book: the best-selling 1984 autobiography of the carmaker executive Lee Iacocca. My dad never worked in the auto industry. We didn’t live in the US at the time. I struggle to interpret what this choice of my dad’s says about a) my dad, b) the book.
I offer a service to scatter-brained people. For a fee, I will lock you into a clean, neatly furnished and well-lit little room with an ensuite bathroom for four hours. The only objects smaller than a chair in that room are a notepad, a ballpoint pen and a hefty book of your choice. Nobody will let you out before the end of your session unless there’s a dire emergency. You are allowed no electronic devices. Nothing interesting happens outside the window.
We regret to inform our valued regular visitors that the Rundkvist Bird Bath is temporarily frozen solid. Service will resume at the first opportunity.
Reading Twain caused me to read up on the First Families of Virginia. Funny, they seem to be a bunch of 17th century English merchants whose descendants imagined themselves to be a kind of American nobility. Pretty sure the actual English nobility wasn’t impressed at all. Particularly after the abolition of slavery sent all the Virginia planters bankrupt!
Employment conditions in archaeology are so uncertain that we’ve got this well-known law: getting her first steady job makes an archaeologist pregnant. Because you won’t get that job easily, and you won’t get it early in your career.
In Western politics of the past 20 years, there’s been this constant opposition between educated city folk and uneducated small-town folk, where the latter carry the rise of fascist parties. Trace these families back to 1900 though, and they’re the same. It’s a clash between the ones who left small towns and the ones who stayed. Generation 4 of my ancestors is 16 people born mainly in the 1880s. Only one was born in Stockholm. The other 15 were born all over rural southern Sweden.
Sun Yat-Sen was the godfather of the revered US scifi writer Cordwainer Smith. Because Smith’s father was the Chinese nationalist leader’s legal adviser in the Philippines.
Keith Moon is one of the great undiagnosed historical ADHD cases. He died aged 32 from misuse of an anti-alcoholism medication. His last words were when he told his girlfriend to fuck off because she didn’t feel like cooking him a meal in the middle of the night. 🙄
Hey, I’ve never lived anywhere as long as in our current house, 17 years. I was only for 15½ years in the one where I grew up.
I’m looking forward so to seeing what my new planting bed of perennials will do come spring. Several of the plants have been quite happy to sprout a little already after I planted them out. But the current ten frost nights in a row will probably put them into their winter sleep.
I read part of Moorcock’s 1976 Elric novel Sailor … last night. Didn’t like it much. Though Elric and his nineteen companions do accidently march up the ass of a giantess and end up in her brain, there is that.
James Branch Cabell’s paternal grandfather went to school with Edgar Allan Poe and was buddies with Robert E. Lee.
The annual budget debate in the municipal council is 12.5 hours including breaks. It is entirely theatre, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Because everyone knows how many seats each party has, and which budget they will support. It never ever happens that, as a result of excellent oratory or new information shared in session, any representative changes their vote. I would use my speaking slot to say “This is pointless theatre. Let’s vote immediately and go home.”
Oh, that was a satisfying coordinate. The Easting of Nättraby Church in the SWEREF grid is 533335.
I often think about the woman who expressed extreme distress and revulsion on Twitter because she’d discovered that 51 isn’t a prime. ❤️
E.R. Eddison’s 1922 novel The Worm Ourobouros is unbelievably poorly structured. It starts out with a brief frame narrative about a modern English viewpoint character who soon starts observing events in a Medieval fantasy world. But Eddison tires of this observer already during ch. 2 and just stops referring to him. The frame narrative never even gets a closing bracket at the end of the book! Why did the editor leave this stuff in!?
If I were a Muslim lady who wanted to wear the niqab in public, and there was a xenophobic masking ban, then I’d just switch to covid masks.
Much needed afternoon and evening of reconnecting with humanity after being housebound for a week. Rode public transport, met a bunch of librarians and archivists and other colleagues at the library, went to an upscale Turkish charcoal BBQ place, played a boardgame at my buddy’s place with some friendly dudes.

Stockholm International Film Festival 2025

At the Stockholm International Film Festival, I hardly ever watch the hip movies that get nominated for awards and are talked about. And if I do watch them I usually don’t like them. I have this simple middle-brow taste with little patience for the artily pretentious.

This year, I attended for the eleventh time in twelve years and watched ten movies. All are from 2025 and none have seen theatrical release yet.

Five get my special recommendation:

Left-handed Girl. A woman moves to Taipei with her daughters and starts a noodle stand in a night market. Everything is gloriously everyday Chinese. Incredible child actress. Tears and laughter.
Splitsville. Open relationship farce.
The Ballad of Wallis Island. Middle-aged folk singer gets booking to play a gig on a remote Scottish island. Upon arrival he discovers that the entire audience is an amiable local eccentric who is an obsessive superfan since the Noughties and has won the lottery.
Magic Farm. Poorly organised US TV documentary team goes to San Christobal to shoot a dance craze, realises that they’ve gone to the wrong Latin American country, makes up a half-assed fictional dance craze with locals. Little action but engaging characters.
Eternity. An afterlife rom-com. An old woman dies and has to choose whether to spend eternity with the man she lived with for 65 years — or with her dashing first husband who went to war and was killed before they’d had one year together. All three at an attractive thirtyish kind of age.

Three were OK:

Jay Kelly. Two middle-aged men questioning their life choices. The Hollywood superstar thinks he should have spent more time with his kids. His manager wonders if they’re really friends. Well crafted and relentlessly conventional.
Egghead Republic. Trippy comedy about a camera team from a sleazy magazine in 2004 that gets access to a post-Soviet environmental disaster zone and/or artist colony in Kazakhstan. Director thinks this is way more funny than I do.
Rabbit Trap. In this slow, atmospheric folk #horror, a 1970s experimental electronic musician settles with her field-recording husband in rural Wales, smokes weed and gets led astray in trippy woods by an androgynous, home-invading Faerie child.

And two were duds:

Reflet dans un diamant mort. Arty re-iteration of all the James Bond clichés, but without a cohesive narrative.
Videoheaven. If you have a soft spot for 80s movies and the old video stores, and you enjoy reading academic film studies papers, then do watch this three-hour documentary. But I haven’t and I don’t. This isn’t one of those documentaries that catch your interest in a subject you thought you didn’t care about.

Here are my capsule reviews from the 2024 festival.

November Pieces Of My Mind #1

Wouldn’t it have been great if, when they stripped down West Semitic polytheism to create Abrahamitic monotheism, they had kept the Sea God instead of the Thunder God? And everybody would think that you went to the seafloor when you died? And the Rapture was the Chosen Few being dragged to the shore and under the waves by invisible hands?
Another weird thing about Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon. These huge animals are mostly highly intelligent, and all of them speak. But they’re unquestioningly loyal to whatever kingdom feeds them. English-speaking dragons are super happy to kill French-speaking dragons for military purposes. They never seem to get the idea that maybe their loyalty should lie with other dragons. But I guess it’s the same as working-class humans in real wars.
I want to see — and HEAR — a fight video where two electronic musicians beat each other up with switched-on theremins.
People would be more impressed by the prowess of the Nazi Active Clubs if they attacked mechanised infantry bases instead of lone immigrants on their way home from work.
There’s a Viking-themed version of the Mörk Borg RPG crowdfunding now. It’s named RAGNA BORG. This is funny, because it’s a woman’s name. When I was a kid, an old lady might be named Ragna Borg. It’s like the big Viking hero in Assassin’s Creed, Eivor. Also an old lady’s name.
Three of us 55ish guys at this gaming table are literally dressed just like this: glasses, fleece sweater, teeshirt, denim jeans, sneakers.
My constant game theory weirdness: I’m not strong enough to compete for the gold medal. I usually compete for the bronze medal. This changes my relationship to other players greatly from the standard game rationality assumptions. We’re usually four around the table. If I use my game resources to attack the strongest player, then s/he places second and I place last. If, instead, I attack the weakest player but me, then the strongest player places first and I place second-last.
I’m quite disappointed with the sales of my new science-based healthy diet book, “It doesn’t matter what you eat as long as it’s varied and a lot of veg”. That’s actually the full text of the book. It’s selling even worse than my previous science-based healthy lifestyle book, whose full text is “Don’t smoke or drink, get daily exercise”. Guess the title.
Two of Sweden’s current Cabinet Ministers are past or current members of the batshit crazy millennarian Pentecostal splinter sect Livets Ord: Busch + Svantesson. This is a movement that wants to immanentise the Eschaton ASAP. Swedish voters don’t seem to understand that our “Christian Democrat Party” is actually a front for Pentecostalism.
News about decelerating economic growth is news about lessened environmental impact.
I’ve been several times around the block of tea. I’ve tasted many rare and expensive vintages and terroirs. Green, oolong, black, smoked, fermented. (Flavoured tea doesn’t even count.) But I’m a simple man. My favourite tea is €10, U$D 11, SEK 110 per kilo down at the supermarket. Indo-Pakistani black CTC granulate. For decades I used to buy this stuff at eight times that price at an upscale shop in town.
I run an office suite, a web browser and an image editing program. I had all the computing power I needed 10-15 years ago. You hear that, IT industry? There’s a market segment that quit caring about your R&D 10-15 years ago. But being profit-motivated, you don’t care about people who want to buy long-lasting stuff, right?
Found one of the other dads from when my youngest was in primary school, dead under a headstone in the churchyard. He died at 58. /-:
Common difference in interpretive perspective: Amateur historian / archaeologist: “Prove that my interpretation can’t be correct.” Me: “Convince me that the issue you deal with can even usefully be discussed with the meagre sources at hand. Convince me that your interpretation is not just possible, but much more likely than any other.”
Or in other words: When you make an interpretation of the past, it’s often not a choice between “You’re right” and “You’re wrong”. There is a third alternative: “You are speculating about an issue that cannot be settled given the available source material.” And if it’s an issue about Swedish written history before about 1550, then it’s almost certain that no additional written sources will ever be found. Because the Swedish Middle Ages are semi-prehistoric.
I am critical to heritage studies.
Being woke is not a Left-Right issue in the original definition. The US Democratic Party is not Left-wing in the original definition. Right-wing populists are not Conservative in the original definition.
People often show me finds and ask me to identify them. Today, for instance, my wife found a vape cartridge on a bike path and asked me about it.
My youngest has often been impatient with my poor memory for who’s who among her friends. Last night I interviewed her about her closest circle and wrote a few sentences about each person. I’m going to email the list to her in 2035.
I just discovered an awesome labour-market combo! The Employment Agency has twice offered me to re-train as a sheet-metal roofer. Now I’ve found a job posting for a sheet-metal working teacher at a skilled manual worker’s high-school in Västerås! KA-CHING!
A quarter century ago I used to love my Sony SRF-S53 FM radio thanks to its punchy bass and tiny size — 75 mm. Bringing it on travels was great — while still on the runway I could tune in local radio. Mine still works! When I turned it on for the first time in decades, the first song I happened to tune in was the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication” from 1999.
Prez 4547 would only be possible in some kind of democracy. Successful dictators tend to be smart people. Vladimir Putin is an uncharismatic sociopath, and he could never win an election. But there is nothing wrong with Putin’s IQ. To get a complete moron in charge, stupid / ignorant / contrarian people must be allowed to vote. (I know that voters can be smart yet ignorant, and smart yet contrarian, “anti-establishment”.)
Most of our problems are down to the fact that we evolved yesterday, geologically speaking, to be members of a 200-person tribe who thinks pottery is an impressive technology and is ready to eat anyone from outside our tribe.
The Chinese government points to the sad mess that is the US, shakes its head and says “Look at the inherent flaws of democracy”. And they’re right. It’s just that this is not an argument for post-Communist Party authoritarianism. It’s simply an argument for there not being any good systems of government at all.
The Kvidinge Monument, an 1826 marble obelisk flanked by two cast-iron lions, has been destroyed by lightning after 199 years. Obvious omen of forthcoming dynastic upheaval in Sweden. Republic now! Instal a decorative president with no legislative powers!
I went to a gig with a mild ear infection and now I have tinnitus. After going to gigs for almost 40 years. /-:
The main standout feature of the 1982 Conan movie is that the two subordinate bad guys Rexor & Thorgrim look like 1970s rock band roadies.
Funny thing about fantasy films: they’re often shot in ruins of Medieval or Early Modern buildings that look nothing like their original state. Funny thing about post-apocalyptic films: they’re often shot in gravel quarries, as if people could survive in a habitat where nothing grows.
Filled out a questionnaire about live events. In the box for “Other requests” I wrote: I WANT TO BUY APPLE PIE WITH CUSTARD SAUCE AT GIGS, NOT BEER
When Evert Baudou surveyed Late Bronze Age stone axes (!) in the 1950s, he knew about 855 of them from the Nordic countries. One of them had been found in a dating context. An artefact class of 855 members dated entirely on comparisons with overseas chronological schemes and a single domestic find combination.
Swedish amateur writers appear particularly vulnerable to being scammed by vanity presses. We don’t even have an equivalent concept in our language that would allow people to go into these deals with open eyes. Instead there are these so-called “hybrid publishing houses”. If they pay to produce, market and distribute your book, then you have a publishing deal. If you pay them to produce, barely market and barely distribute your book, then you’re the customer of a vanity press.
Reeling in shock after learning how Americans pronounce “Dachshund”.
Jehovah’s Witnesses lose state funding in Sweden after only six years because they expel gay members. This breaks one of the democracy criteria that the funding is conditional on. Annually, SEK 1.8 million = € 160,000.
Every bailout must entail a nationalisation. After a bailout, your bank or ai company needs to be public property.
Christians through the ages have taken heart from Scriptural encouragement that tells them that if they are prosecuted, then it means they’re like Jesus and they’re right. I once years ago met with the exact same attitude from an intellectual historian: they quoted Bourdieu to the effect that scientists do not like being investigated by critical sociologists. It’s childish, I know, but I’m glad this person never had an academic career after grad school.
New word to me, while reading Dickens: TERGIVERSATE: to make conflicting or evasive statements.
I often text my wife a heart, a kissy face and an aubergine.
Time is strange. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Fisksätra since 1987 and lived here since 1992. People here like to become parents early. This means that I remember grandparents here as children.
Plot devices in Dickens that you don’t see much in recent fiction: a) Several characters turn out to be someone’s long lost relative, b) Two characters happen to be extremely similar in appearance, c) A chapter consists of a manuscript a character wrote 30 years ago and has forgotten about
An afterlife would be kind of weird. Consider my grandpa who died in a car crash at age 40. His son was 7 at the time. If they were reunited in an afterlife, then grandpa would get to know a son who had lived more than twice as long as he did. My dad is 82 right now and doing pretty well.
I’m the talkiest account on the @archaeo.social Mastodon server.
My buddy’s 90s gaming group often convened at the apartment of a member who cleaned his toilet so rarely that female gamers refused to go there and two male group members caught bacterial infections of the testes from using the loo. 😬
Talked to my wife about sexual experience. We agreed that remembering to take your undies off is definitely one sign of it.
Bizarrely, one of the commercials screened before every movie at this year’s Stockholmfilmfestival is overt pro-mining propaganda. The message is “If you want an electric car then you need to accept mining”. 😄
I would like to enact a soft secession from stupid and ignorant people, please.
Again: Don’t believe them. LLM text generators creating lots of slop web sites does not damage the Web. It just makes search engines useless. Google is simply pivoting from a) providing Web search to b) letting you query a pre-trained LLM. This means that we’ll be back to hand-curated links and trusted sites, like in the 90s. I’m fine with that. You’ll find my writing here, as always.
Love Jon Peterson: “The sudden popularity of Tolkien triggered reprints and sales of … Robert E. Howard, best remembered as the creator of Conan the Cimmerian, a noted barbarian.” /PATW 1:65
November tomatoes from greenhouses in the Netherlands. Such a pointless product. Taste less even than the cucumbers.
Check your favourite area in Sweden for cool listed buildings! There’s lots of descriptive text about most of them.

Five Years Of Renewed Game-Mastering

Six weeks ago marked my fifth anniversary out of the game-mastering Deep Freeze. This term is common among UK podcasters and gamers for when people who had played role-playing games a lot during their youth in the 80s and 90s came back to the hobby in their middle age from the 2010s onwards. I quit in 1997, dabbled a little with the game-masterless Fiasco from 2013 onward, and started my current streak of intensive game-mastering in September of 2020. In this I was inspired by the Ken & Robin podcast and by pandemic isolation.

We didn’t have a lockdown in Sweden, thank goodness, because our epidemiologists realised early on that children didn’t spread the virus much and would suffer much worse damage from disrupted schooling than from covid-19. But we all self-isolated as best we could. And so me and four players decided that if we met a few times a month, just us, it would do wonders for our mental health without increasing the spread of the virus significantly.

Since then I’ve had a steady gaming group, with currently seven players, two of them original 2020 members. We convene whenever I can get at least three of them to show up, which typically happens three times a month.

We’re way better organised and focused now than when I was in middle school and high school. 20-year-old me would be astonished to learn that my really solid RPG-playing period would start at age 48, and completely dwarf the number of gaming sessions I got done as a boy. 139 sessions in five years and six weeks! And we’re having a blast!

These are the games I’ve run. It’s mostly investigative games in the tradition of Call of Cthulhu.

Delta Green: X-files plus H.P. Lovecraft. 32 sessions + 1 at a gaming convention.
Swords of the Serpentine: Investigations in fantasy Venice. 25 + 2.
Ashen Stars: FBI Space Opera. 24.
Mutant Year Zero: Start to re-build after WW3. 15.
Drakar och Demoner (80s rules): Picaresque Medieval fantasy. 14 + 1.
Brindlewood Bay: Little old ladies solve murder cases in Lovecraft country. 7 + 6.
Vaesen: Investigate folkloric beings in the Hammer Horror 1800s. 10 + 2.

Dear Reader, can you recommend any good investigative RPGs with a healthy number of big solid scenario modules?

October Pieces Of My Mind #3

Timeless wisdom for RPGs: it’s a waste of time to optimise your player character for combat if your game master doesn’t know the combat rules.
Listening to a podcast yesterday, I was shocked. Not because they said that novels based on RPG campaigns are awful. This is true. But because they offhandedly dropped the opinion that the Dragonlance novels would be an exception to this rule. The horror…
I just apologised to a web server. Because I clicked on the wrong link and bothered it needlessly.
I can never get used to being a grey-whiskered senior academic at lectures and seminars. I still assume that I’m a 22-y-o PhD student.
The other day this chonky cat that smelled of grannie perfume came RUNNING up to me, an unknown man on a bicycle, from a distance, demanded cuddles & scritches, and purred loudly. ❤️
I want to see machine learning applied to some popular modern designer boardgames. Sure, fine, chess and go. But what will it do with Catan and Ticket To Ride?
Sam Altman is an Elon, not a Woz. He doesn’t know how to build machine learning applications.
Occasionally people have told me hey, you’re kind of a celebrity in archaeology, right? I always reply that this may be true, but that being a celebrity in Scandy archaeology is like being super famous in the model railroading hobby.
I’m starting to understand what they mean when they say LLM s are destroying the Open Web. Of course the proliferation of slop sites can’t destroy your good site. What they actually destroy is search engines, that can’t tell slop and real stuff apart. This means that we’ll be back to hand-curated links and trusted sites, like in the 90s. I’m fine with that.
Back in the Napster era, people wore teeshirts with the slogan “Your broken business model is not my problem”. It’s time now to print teeshirts reading YOUR BROKEN LARGE LANGUAGE MODEL IS NOT MY PROBLEM
I was brought up to believe that men who are stupid, strong and violent are ridiculous. I have enjoyed decades of considerable popularity as a smart, wimpy and peaceful man. It never occurred to me that there might be men who can’t realistically aspire to be anything but stupid, strong and violent, and who were waiting for someone to tell them that they were awesome.
My youngest has joined a secret academic society for ladies. ❤️
The Active Club movement consists of young Nazis who work out and practice martial arts for an imagined future race war. We recently saw an example in Stockholm of the heroic feats of glorious Aryan power this training is intended to make possible. Four young guys attacked one middle-aged man from behind, got him down and kicked out five of his teeth. True valour and fearlessness!
I have this extra job where I sweep and vacuum a bakery off hours. It turns me on like crazy, because I have this deflouring fetish.
The shipwreck of the passenger ferry Estonia is under an international diving interdictum. This, Süddeutsche Zeitung now reports, has allowed the Russians to use the wreck as a fixed instrument platform for spying purposes.
Strange and amazing to see colleagues and revisit archaeological periods that I have known for 30 years but haven’t been in touch with in years. It’s like getting the answers to an exam. I remember everyone here when they were 25.
The artefact finds and bones from the Neolithic seal hunting site at Norvik, Nynäshamn, weigh 1.75 metric tonnes. Imagine what this means for museum logistics in perpetuity.
To my surprise, two people whose science writing I respected greatly in the skeptics’ movement 15 years ago increasingly appear in fringe value-conservative outlets voicing opinions with a shaky scientific basis. Now I find them speaking at a conference against mainstream medical opinion about transsexuality.
323 days until we vote away the Fascist-dependent Kristersson government.
I’m a really bad audience for a pep rally. I’m cynical, ironic and I really don’t enjoy being part of a cheering crowd of political partisans. Also the Left Party is a really big umbrella that contains people whose priorities may not quite collide, but are at least orthogonal to each other. I care about wealth redistribution, environment, education, ethnic integration and demilitarisation. I’m just vaguely supportive of oppressed overseas people and my LGBTQ friends.
Funny thing — I’m an unemployed middle-aged white man who will never make as much money as my dad did. And still I don’t feel any attraction to fascism.
The Stones were a cover band before their third album.
Just over half of Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities takes place years before the French Revolution.
Stockholm’s 1859 South Theatre, Södra Teatern, isn’t doing so well. Paint flaking everywhere. Shabby without being chic. Great location, I imagine it shouldn’t be too hard to make it turn a profit as a comedy stage & gig venue. But then, nothing lasts forever.
Sorry for being slow. But you know what electric cars and charging at home means? Gas stations will go the way of the video store. There will only be highway taverns with charging points. Gas stations will be gone in my lifetime.
I’ve never reflected over how the palatial local manor house came into being. It was built in the 1760s by a commoner merchant with money from the Swedish East Indies Company. Only later was the family ennobled.
Everyone knows that there are innumerable Medieval fantasy RPGs. But there’s also an incredible number of Lovecraft / Cthulhu horror RPGs. I’m pretty sure that almost none of these have been published after a sober evaluation of the profit potential.
I worry way more than my players do about their RPG characters having adequate motivation. Unless they face extreme danger they will usually just happily follow whatever lead they’ve picked up. Because the players are largely motivated by curiosity, by finding out secrets and solving cases. If the characters don’t seem likely to care, then this is just a minor embarrassment.
There seems to be a Tom of Finland fan here in this small town. He’s scribbled “POLICE = GAY” at the bus station.
A tall person is someone whose parents managed to feed them adequately through childhood. (The reverse is not true.)
I’m tending ~25 rosebushes now including the neighbours’. So now I’ve branched out, ordered and planted other perennials: larkspur, fernleaf yarrow, orpine, whorled tickseed. Plus tulips. And I’m adding hollyhock in the spring. Sw. praktriddarsporre, praktröllika, höstkärleksört, höstöga, tulpaner, stockrosor.
Was reminded by a podcast that there are people who collect and read RPG books for fun. I do not. I study an RPG scenario intensively a week or two before I’m scheduled to game-master it, and when the time comes, I run that thing from only the sketchiest idea about how the rules work.
Filling in my information on a job application site, I am tempted to say Citizenship Swaziland and Previous Workplace Pitcairn, instead of Sweden and Poland.
The Kingdom of Hawaii had a royal bandmaster from Prussia between 1872 and 1915. He had previously toured across Europe with Johann Strauss the Younger’s orchestra.
Naomi Novik’s 2006 novel His Majesty’s Dragon is set during the Napoleonic Wars, but there are air forces in the form av talking dragons. These dragons are described as huge, beautiful and non-scary. But in order for this to work, Novik has to gloss over their feeding habits. The dragons are fed live cows that they “hunt” for themselves inside enclosures. Imagine the constant panicked stampeding whenever a dragon flies over, the broken fences, the tortured lowing of dying cows.
Cooked pasta Bolognese. Mended some socks. Wife at choir practice. Listening to the dishwasher and the air source heat pump while reading. And you?
You just never stop missing your small kids, do you?
As a Socialist you know it’s strange times when your main political opponents include not only the capital owners but also at least the male half of the working class.
As a lifelong Tolkien fan, I’m deeply unhappy about the contexts in which the Palantir and Anduril are mentioned in the news these days. Tolkien was an Eco-Conservative and has been described as an Anarcho-Monarchist.
I keep getting these letters where recruitment software asks me what I think about the process I’ve gone through. The process that led to me not getting the job I applied for. The process that proved to be a waste of my time. Buddy, those questionnaire data may not be super useful.
18 years ago I found a 16th century sword. I am trying to find out if anyone except myself has commented on it since in the research literature. My colleague at the Royal Armoury now tells me that there is no standard work about bladed weapons of 16th century Scandinavia. This is astonishing to me as an Iron Age scholar. We have three consecutive standard works about Viking Period swords, published from the 1920s onward.
Occasionally people who contact me on archaeological subjects are extremely deferential, like, “Oh ye Academic Duke, please be not offended that I, a peasant, darken your doorstep with my ignorant query”. This makes me embarrassed, particularly when it’s someone I’ve met in the field, talked to, collaborated with. I’m really not that guy. In order for me to treat you with scorn and hostility, on the contrary; you need to speak an extreme form of fad academese.
I’m starting to feel employable. I’ve had two good job interviews in October, and I’ve submitted two strong job applications to the kind of employer that takes a year to hire anyone.
Come to think of it, you can do worse as a trans girl than grow up with a dad that sits the whole family down to watch the Rocky Horror Picture Show when you’re 14.
Dark, high-percentage chocolate is such a pointless product. Just give me a Snickers bar.
Tried three free image location ID web sites with the same screenshotted pics from my buddy’s balcony. None were able to pinpoint them correctly. All three correctly identified the location as somewhere in the southern 1/3 of Scandinavia — but indicated wildly erroneous coordinates in that region. It seems the image recognition technology can recognise Scandy urban architecture in general, but not identify individual buildings.
Funny thing about feeding birds: only certain species are comfortable at bird feeders. When you install one, the shyer birds stay away from the ruckus. We actually see a greater diversity of birds around our house since we quit feeding them. But it’s true, we haven’t got two great tits and a blackbird constantly eating outside our kitchen window.
Tune fieldwork report (in Swedish) has been approved by the County Archaeologist and I’ve now released it into the wild. It’s in Swedish, but the hundreds of finds kind of speak for themselves!
When Black Sabbath created the template for metal with their first album in 1970, they were inspired by horror movies. Take a moment to think about what horror movies that might have been. To this day, metal fans revere that album. But horror fans mostly just smile and laugh at 1960s movies, which scare nobody today.
Translating a story whose entire plot hinges on the fact that Europeans have convinced Hawaiians that they have immortal souls that may end up in eternal hell. Really annoying. I just want to tell them “Relax, there is nothing at all after death; the same nothingness as before your parents conceived you”.
I’m on the Vikingology Vodcast, talking about the Tune fieldwork back in April!
Hehe. This fantasy writer imagines martial monks with “concealed crossbows”. Context suggests that he means that they’ve got them under their habits / clothes!