#we have NOTHING in scandinavia

[alienaiver]

as one of the few pop team epic fans in my area, i really am living my best life here in japan

[reasonsforhope]

The World's Forests Are Doing Much Better Than We Think

You might be surprised to discover... that many of the world’s woodlands are in a surprisingly good condition. The destruction of tropical forests gets so much (justified) attention that we’re at risk of missing how much progress we’re making in cooler climates.

That’s a mistake. The slow recovery of temperate and polar forests won’t be enough to offset global warming, without radical reductions in carbon emissions. Even so, it’s evidence that we’re capable of reversing the damage from the oldest form of human-induced climate change — and can do the same again.

Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.

That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.

Logging in the tropics means that the world as a whole is still losing trees. Brazil alone removed enough woodland since 1992 to counteract all the growth in China, the EU and US put together. Even so, the planet’s forests as a whole may no longer be contributing to the warming of the planet. On net, they probably sucked about 200 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year between 2011 and 2020, according to a 2021 study. The CO2 taken up by trees narrowly exceeded the amount released by deforestation. That’s a drop in the ocean next to the 53.8 billion tons of greenhouse gases emitted in 2022 — but it’s a sign that not every climate indicator is pointing toward doom...

More than a quarter of Japan is covered with planted forests that in many cases are so old they’re barely recognized as such. Forest cover reached its lowest extent during World War II, when trees were felled by the million to provide fuel for a resource-poor nation’s war machine. Akita prefecture in the north of Honshu island was so denuded in the early 19th century that it needed to import firewood. These days, its lush woodlands are a major draw for tourists.

It’s a similar picture in Scandinavia and Central Europe, where the spread of forests onto unproductive agricultural land, combined with the decline of wood-based industries and better management of remaining stands, has resulted in extensive regrowth since the mid-20th century. Forests cover about 15% of Denmark, compared to 2% to 3% at the start of the 19th century.

Even tropical deforestation has slowed drastically since the 1990s, possibly because the rise of plantation timber is cutting the need to clear primary forests. Still, political incentives to turn a blind eye to logging, combined with historically high prices for products grown and mined on cleared tropical woodlands such as soybeans, palm oil and nickel, mean that recent gains are fragile.

There’s no cause for complacency in any of this. The carbon benefits from forests aren’t sufficient to offset more than a sliver of our greenhouse pollution. The idea that they’ll be sufficient to cancel out gross emissions and get the world to net zero by the middle of this century depends on extraordinarily optimistic assumptions on both sides of the equation.

Still, we should celebrate our success in slowing a pattern of human deforestation that’s been going on for nearly 100,000 years. Nothing about the damage we do to our planet is inevitable. With effort, it may even be reversible.

-via Bloomburg, January 28, 2024

[pitchsidestories]

aurora II Mapi León x Reader

masterlist | word count: 1190

summary: Mapi and reader getting engaged under the northern lights.

author's note: dear readers, this cute oneshot was requested and we hope you'll like it as much as we did writing the story. 🫶🏻🫶🏻

„Oh, Mapi, you know you didn’t need to.”, you began, your voice full of emotions.  

In your slightly shaky hands, you held the opened envelope in which there was an invitation to see the Northern lights. A childhood dream was laying in your palms.

It was coming true, and you were going to see that natural wonder with no other than the person you loved the most. A single tear ran down your cheek as an incredible feeling of gratitude spread through you.

The Spaniard pressed a featherlight kiss to the place where your cheek was still a bit wet.  “But I wanted to. I know you always wanted to do that, and you deserve it after the year you’ve had.”

For a brief moment, your face darkened; the last few months of the 2024/25 football season had been really tough for you. While Mapi and Irene were fit enough to play in the starting eleven again, you were demoted to the substitutes' bench again, after having grown in the role of defender and been indispensable to the team for many months.

Obviously, you were happy for the two, yet it hurt to be only considered the second choice once more.

“Thank you, amor.”, you whispered gratefully.

“You’re welcome.”, she replied.

“I simply can’t wait for that.”, you hummed excitedly. Something magical at the end of the year was just what you needed, a small winter miracle.

“Luckily, you don’t have to wait for long.”, Mapi reminded you softly.

‘But you're going to be so cold!’ you realised, and there was a hint of a guilty conscience in your voice.

“You can keep me warm.”, the defender responded with an amused smile on her lips.

“I promise I’ll.”, you grinned at your girlfriend.

“Also I already bought us matching sweaters.”,Mapi confessed sheepishly

“You did?”, you asked her touched by such a thoughtful and admittable, cheesy gesture.

“I did.”, she confirmed smirking.

“Maria Pilar, you’re the softest human with tattoos I’ve ever met, I swear.”, you said.

“My tattoos have nothing to do with that.”, the fellow football player laughed.

The weeks had flown by.

Still, it felt to you like a dream when Mapi and you were looking up to the night sky in the northern parts of Scandinavia. The northern lights above your heads.

“Yes.”, she agreed solemnly. With curious eyes the defender turned her head to look at you.  “Is it just like you imagined?”

“No, it’s even better.”, you admitted.

“It’s?”, Mapi questioned happily.

You quickly pressed a kiss to her cheek: “Yes, because you’re here with me.“

“You’re so sweet.“, your girlfriend smiled, her cheeks red from the cold.

“Also this feels so good right now. We’re only half way through the season but it’s already been an exhausting one for sure.“

“I know. And that’s why you’re not supposed to think about football here.“, Mapi reminded you gently.

You nodded gingerly. Of course she was right, this was not the time or place to think about football when you finally got to see this remarkable light display with your own eyes. “Sorry.“

Silently, you both watched on for a moment, taking everything in. You still couldn’t believe this was all real. It was almost verging on overwhelming.

“Y/n?”, Mapi said suddenly into the night.

“Hm?”, you replied without taking your eyes off the sky.

“I need to ask you something.“

Finally you turned towards her and what you saw, made the northern lights pale in comparison. There was no way to top this, yet Mapi found away.

The defender kneeled in front of you, holding a delicate golden ring in a little box.

“Oh my god!”, you whispered, incapable of stringing more words together.

“I haven’t asked yet.“, Mapi chuckled.

You shook your head in disbelief: “Well, you already got down on one knee in the freezing cold and pulled out a ring from your jacket so this is pretty self-explanatory!”

“So… Can I get an answer then?”

“Without asking? Hm…“, you teased her.

Mapi shot you a look: “You just said I didn’t have to.“

“It’s a yes, amor.“, you finally answered. You couldn’t contain the smile spreading across your face when you pulled Mapi up from the snowy ground and kissed her.

“You will be my wife?”, she asked as if she needed confirmation that you knew what you had just agreed to.

“Yes, and you’ll be mine.“

She beamed at you happily: “I will be. Even in the cold… Can we go inside now?”

“Of course, I can’t let my fiancée freeze any longer.“, you nodded with a laugh and led her inside your rented cabin.

“Thank you.“, your fiancée said, rubbing her hands together to warm them back up once she was inside.

“You’re welcome. Do you want me to make you some hot chocolate?”, you suggested once you saw how badly Mapi was shivering.

“Yes, please.“

While she took off her boots and winter jacket, you disappeared into the small rustic kitchen only to return with two mugs of steaming hot chocolate a few minutes later. You had even added mini marshmallows. Carefully, you handed Mapi a mug and watched her take a sip.

“Better?”

“A lot.“

“Good.“, you sighed relieved.

“That’s all I ever wanted.”, the defender realized gratefully.  

“A hot chocolate under the northern lights?”, you asked her amused.

“With my future wife.”, she added proudly. Her words made you feel suddenly very hot, so you had to pull off the scarf.

Despite the rather chaotic proposal you heard yourself saying. “Feels like a dream.”

“It does, huh?”

“Yes, I don’t want to wake up from it yet.”, you confessed.

The fireplace crackled in the background.

“You don’t have to. That’s our life right now.”, Mapi reassured you, the Spaniard gently touched your chin and turned it towards her so that you could look into her hungry eyes.

They and her waiting lips were the invitation you needed, both of your mouths touching in perfect unison, the kiss was perfect, bittersweet, you could still taste the hot chocolate in it.

Then she leant her forehead against yours, her sentence sounded full of promise. “Love you, future wifey.”

“Te amo.”, you whispered gently in your fiancées mother tongue.

“I know.”, Mapi chuckled, her lips escaping a protesting sound once you got up to light some candles and turned out the big lights, so it was even cozier than before.

“Isn’t this perfect.”, the Spaniard admired.

“It’s plus we can see the northern lights from our beds.”, you pointed excitedly to the glass ceiling which gave a picturesque view of the night sky above your heads.

“Nice, right?”, she grinned, as you both laid down on the soft mattress.

“Yes, it’s an amazing place to make..”, you started blushing.

“Love?”, Mapi finished the sentence for you with a teasing look on her face.

“Yes.”, you bit your lips while your fiancée began to leave small kisses all over your body.

Aurora, the blush of dawn would be here soon, but you two had only eyes for each other as you made love under the most beautiful sky you’ve ever seen.

if you enjoyed this story reblogs, comments and likes are always appreciated !

Christmas/Winter Oneshots

[mehilaiselokuva]

Is there any specific literature you could recommend for those who want to learn more about the pre-Christian culture in Finland? (In Finnish or in English!)

Hi!

I can link both. I have some personal faves but they are only accessible through our university's accounts...

The first page is a website with multiple good texts about this subject. It is the site of Jaakko Häkkinen, which if you google him you can see that he is a credible source. There are also texts about subjects like language and history.

This article (in Finnish) discusses the claim that Finland had ancient kingdoms. I also listened to this podcast episode from Yle Areena about it (in Finnish).

Yana Borodulina's master's thesis Suomalaisten uskomustarinoiden yliluonnolliset olennot ja niiden nimityksien alkuperä (2016) (in Finnish) is a very good text if you want to read about what ancient Finns believed in (without Kalevala pseudo-Finnish stories!)

An article about the Finnish "bear cult": THE BEAR AND THE YEAR: ON THE ORIGIN OF THE FINNISH LATE IRON AGE FOLK CALENDAR AND ITS CONNECTION TO THE BEAR CULT by Marianna P. Ridderstad (in English) was very fun to read! I will include it only because I love that they mention the Finnish 13th month which has been lost to time. This one is short though.

An article in English with the absolute basics of the ancient Finnish religion, made by Anssi Alhonen from the politically independent organization Taivaannaula.

Now while I cannot give you recommendations on physical books and only have PDFs (we are very digital at our university I guess) I can tell you what to avoid when looking for these books in stores or in the library. A credible book about pre-Christian culture in Finland would NOT promote:

Finnish runic writing. If there were runes found in Finland, they were imported from Scandinavia.

Finnish pre-Latin alphabet. Nothing like this has been found to this day.

"Finnish people descended from the Mongols"/"Finns are mongoloid". Modern genetic technology says otherwise. Put the book down immediately if it says this (or don't, who am I to tell you)

Describing the pre-Christian culture as "vulgar" or similar words. (This point may be ignored if you have good media literacy)

Using the Kalevala as a credible source for Finnish culture.

Additional: beware of texts written by a specific type of people. I would avoid people who do not cite sources. (I have stumbled across so many Neopagan witches who just write stuff like "ancient Finnish spells" which cannot be found in any archive. We have real spells too! No need to make up history)

Hope this helps!

[olderthannetfic]

Recently watched some kinda documentary, more like short docu-vid abt a town that burnt down some thousand+ of years ago, and the only thing that showed that the town existed was some tiny pottery shards that got preserved all over what ppl assume used to be the town. Nothing special, just some lil town in the middle of what's basically rural nowhere. And like, the reason that's the only thing left was bc the entire town was probably built completely out of lumber, straw or some other flammable material and went up in flames. And I'm kinda like, damn how many towns and civilisations built from stuff like lumber existed but just got burnt down? Accident or in warfare? Lots of war stuff would have ppl burning down places to weaken the enemy or to place your own stuff on top, Scandinavia today seems to be like 80% lumber in rural areas. I know that some pre-Christian cultures and religions got destroyed, assimilated and burnt down in Europe, and the same with Pre-Islam cultures got destroyed by invaders. How much shit is gone just bc it was easy to burn, or otherwise destroyed or assimilated? Like, I know ppl talk abt all that shit, but so much has like a historical scar you can look at, but what abt those that didn't even leave a scar?

--

But nonnie, postholes!

Archeology is really cool, and we actually can spot all-wood things in many cases, even if they did get burned down and/or rot away centuries ago. In fact, if they were burned down, they're sometimes easier to spot.

[hellsite-hall-of-fame]

Morbius (2022)

\[♪♪♪\]

\[WIND WHISTLING\]

\[BIRDS CHIRPING\]

\[THUNDER RUMBLING IN DISTANCE\]

\[WATER DRIPS ECHOING\]

\[BATS SKITTERING\]

\[HELICOPTER WHIRRING\]

\[MEN YELLING INDISTINCTLY IN SPANISH\]

We shouldn’t be here when it gets dark.

Set the trap at the mouth of the cave, please.

\[MEN SPEAKING IN SPANISH\]

\[WINCES\]

PILOT: You need a doctor?

\[CHUCKLES SOFTLY\]

I am a doctor.

It’s impressive, don’t you think?

Vampire bats weigh almost nothing, but they can down a creature nearly ten times their size.

\[FLIES BUZZING\]

Wow.

What are you using as bait?

You volunteering?

Leaving.

\[TRAP CLANKS\]

Pay me now.

Before the sun goes down.

You throw in that bushcrafter on your belt and we have a deal.

\[♪♪♪\]

\[GROANS SOFTLY\]

\[ALL CHITTERING\]

\[SCREECHES\]

\[BATS SCREECHING\]

\[SHOUTS IN SPANISH\]

\[YELLING IN SPANISH\]

Come on.

\[BELL TOLLING\]

\[STUDENTS LAUGHING, CHATTERING\]

Move!

\[TICKING\]

\[CAR HORN HONKS\]

NICHOLAS: Should be able to take better care of you here.

\[CAR DOOR CLOSES, CAR DRIVES AWAY\]

Everyone’s here to help you.

Michael, this is Lucian. Lucian, Michael.

Michael knows more about this place than I do.

\[WHISPERS\] Play nice.

LUCIAN: Hello.

Hello, Milo.

My name’s Lucian.

The person who was here before was Milo.

No.

He was also the new Milo.

And before him was the other new Milo.

I don’t even remember the first Milo.

How long have you been here?

Long as I can remember.

\[MACHINE BEEPS AND WHIRS\]

And you’re still not cured?

There is no cure.

There’s something missing from our DNA.

Like a piece of a puzzle.

And until they find it, the only way to stay alive is an oil change three times a day.

What would you do if you could be normal?

Just for an hour?

I don’t think about it.

Hey, look at the freaks! Look at them!

\[STUDENTS CHATTERING, LAUGHING\]

Best not to be outside when school gets out.

Like the original Spartans, we are the few against the many.

\[BEEPING\]

Milo?

Milo?

\[ALERT BUZZING\]

Nurse?

\[♪♪♪\]

\[WHISPERS\] Okay…

\[BEEPS AND WHIRS\]

Lucian.

Lucian!

With one of these?

It took a team of scientists to build that machine and you fixed it with a ballpoint pen?

There’s a school for gifted children in New York.

I think that I could get them to agree to cover your tuition and provide private care to help manage your condition.

Somewhere you could study, learn, hone your skills.

You have a gift, Michael.

I don’t think I could forgive myself if I saw it go to waste.

MICHAEL: “Dear Milo, this isn’t goodbye. I’m gonna find a cure for us, so we can be cranky old men someday. Your friend, Michael.

P.S. You shouldn’t have unfolded this. Now you’ll never get it back together. See you this summer.”

No.

\[STUDENTS CHATTERING\]

“Dear Milo…”

\[ALL LAUGH\]

Please, can I have my letter back?

What?

Please, can I have my letter?

Okay. Here.

\[LAUGHS\]

Please. Ah!

\[SHOUTS\] Please!

\[BOYS LAUGHING\]

Please!

\[YELLS\]

Stop.

\[GROANING\]

\[BOYS GRUNTING\]

\[NICHOLAS YELLS IN SPANISH\]

Go away!

\[SIREN WAILS IN DISTANCE\]

Let me have a look. Let me have a look.

\[SCREAMS\]

He tried to steal my letter!

Milo, Milo, stop.

Stop. Stop. Stop.

\[CRYING\]

What about Milo?

I’ll look after Milo.

He needs me.

NICHOLAS: Michael Morbius completed his doctorate by 19 and quickly established himself as the world’s leading authority on blood-borne diseases.

His development of artificial blood has saved more lives than penicillin.

Michael Morbius, please step forward to acknowledge the receipt of your prize from His Majesty, the King of Sweden.

\[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING\]

\[TRUMPETERS PLAY FANFARE\]

ANNA: I can’t believe you dissed the king of Sweden.

The king and the queen, their loyal subjects, all of Scandinavia and the entire scientific community.

Yeah, but who does that?

Well, Anna, we both know I have issues.

But, hey, I kept the program.

\[TONE SOUNDS, THEN WOMAN SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY OVER PA\]

\[KNOCKS\] There you are.

Hey, Dr. Bancroft.

Hey, Anna.

We going to play?

Oh, I don’t think so.

See, now that Dr. Morbius is back, maybe you should try losing for a while, see how that feels.

MICHAEL: Not gonna happen.

Michael.

Uh, yes?

You got a minute?

Of course.

New one. For your collection.

\[WHISPERS\] Dr. Morbius is in trouble.

I’m in trouble.

MARTINE: “I can’t accept a prize for the by-product of a failed experiment.”

Lab 1.

Front page, “American Scientist Rejects Nobel Prize.”

You know that people actually like writing checks to Nobel laureates?

Makes them feel better about their investment.

It would help if you stuck around long enough to cash them.

\[GROANS\]

You’re pushing yourself too hard.

\[SIGHS\]

Does our generous benefactor, Milo, know what you’re actually doing here?

What am I actually doing here?

Remixing human DNA with bat DNA.

I have no idea what you’re…

Talking about?

Is anything ringing a bell?

No bells ringing. Uh…

Okay. Maybe this will jog your memory.

MICHAEL: I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.

\[BATS SCREECHING\]

That is a…

It’s a fish tank.

Hmm.

Like, for… flying mammals.

Oh, I see.

Some friends I brought back from Costa Rica.

So when were you gonna tell me?

More importantly, how did you get my pass code?

It’s the first six digits of pi backwards.

It’s your password for everything.

You should change that.

You could lose your license for this.

I’m not gonna need it much longer, doctor.

You, on the other hand, will.

You know, there’s something called “plausible deniability.”

You should be thanking me.

These are the only mammals on Earth that have evolved to feed exclusively on blood.

So in order to drink it, these bats produce saliva that contains unique anticoagulants.

So your theory is, if you can successfully splice vampire genes into your DNA, it would allow your body to produce those same anticoagulants.

MICHAEL: Yes.

It would be a cure.

At what cost?

The fusion of different species is a legacy we already carry in our bodies.

Viruses insinuating their nucleic acid onto our own over hundreds of thousands of years.

That’s evolution. This is different.

I don’t think it is.

We have to push the boundaries, take the risks.

Without that, there is no science.

No medicine.

No breakthroughs at all.

\[MACHINE BEEPING\]

\[CHIMES, THEN BEEPING SOFTLY\]

Okay.

\[RECORDER BEEPS\]

Test subject for cell combination 117.

\[MOUSE SQUEAKING\]

\[BEEPS\]

Come on, come on, come on.

\[SQUEALING\]

\[RECORDER BEEPS\]

\[SIGHS\] Test subject 117 has resulted in…

failure.

\[RECORDER BEEPS\]

I don’t wanna see you get hurt.

I should’ve died years ago, Martine.

Why am I still alive if not to fix this?

To save my best friend, Milo.

And everyone else like us.

Not like this.

Dr. Morbius, it’s Anna.

\[♪♪♪\]

\[MONITORS BEEPING RAPIDLY\]

\[PANTING\]

Her temperature’s spiking, and her kidneys are shutting down.

We have to induce a coma before she has a stroke.

A hundred milligrams of propofol.

NURSE: Sure.

MARTINE: Now.

Come on.

MICHAEL: It’s okay.

It’s okay. We got you.

There you go.

There you go.

Thank you, nurse.

We’re gonna let you sleep a bit.

Take a nice long nap.

\[MONITOR BEEPING STEADILY\]

\[SQUEAKING\]

Michael.

What?

It worked.

\[♪♪♪\]

\[CLOCK CHIMES\]

Dr. Michael Morbius.

\[IN NORWEGIAN\] Some crippled guy’s here to see the Boss.

MILO: Michael! Get over here!

\[IN NORWEGIAN\] As long as I am a cripple you’ll be fine.

♪ Stop dreaming Of the quiet life… ♪

You’re late. I was trying out this new thing called “working.”

Oh, yeah. I don’t believe I’m familiar with the word.

I don’t believe you are.

So, what’s up with the goon squad?

Oh, I won a hand of cards against some Russian gentlemen.

Apparently they found his luck improbable.

There you are.

More like impossible.

So, doctor, how is our favorite patient?

Still determined to make his short life even shorter?

Yes, I am. Anyway, you’re one to talk.

You look terrible. Look at the state of you.

Says the man wearing… What is that, a quilt?

Oh, sorry. I didn’t get the memo to dress for a funeral.

\[LAUGHS\]

\[CHUCKLES\]

Right. I will see you later.

And you… my door is always open.

We miss you at Horizon.

We could use your mind.

I’ll leave you two to your fun.

Bye, Nicholas.

I have some good news.

Let’s go for a walk.

How’s Martine doing these days?

Dr. Bancroft? She is, uh, overqualified, outperforming, brilliant as usual.

And a royal pain in my ass.

But she’s keeping me honest for the most part. Why do you ask?

Eh, no reason. Just haven’t seen you in forever.

I wondered if she had something to do with it.

Aw, I miss you too.

But, yes, she has been working with me to save our lives.

I could ask her to stop if you like, put us out of our misery.

Just don’t do something stupid and go and fall in love because, believe you me, there is absolutely no cure for that.

Says the guy who knows absolutely nothing about the subject.

Not true.

I read about it in books all the time.

Books, really? Wow.

Yeah.

Or romantic comedies. The point is…

The point is, love is not on the cards for us, my friend.

Listen, if you start quoting The Notebook to me, I am going to stop and hobble very slowly in the opposite direction.

\[LAUGHS\]

Throw it!

MICHAEL: I’m close, Milo.

I can feel it.

A cure.

It’s finally possible.

Seriously?

Highly experimental.

Ethically questionable.

Very, very, very expensive.

I knew that was coming.

And not exactly legal.

Oh, and it has to be done in international waters.

\[LAUGHS\]

You were always expensive.

Is it dangerous? Should I be worried?

You want me to lie to you?

That would be nice, yes.

It’s a walk in the park on a sunny day.

Oh, yeah, that bad, eh?

Listen.

We don’t have much time left.

This could be our last chance.

So, what do you say?

We go out with a fight?

\[SIGHS\]

Yeah.

You with me?

Till the day you die, brother.

Till the day you die. You’ll have everything you need.

We’re the original Spartans, mate.

The few against the many.

Yeah.

\[♪♪♪\]

\[INDISTINCT CHATTER OVER RADIO\]

You know, I’m sure you’re cheating.

No. No, you’re not.

What you got?

MICHAEL: Putting another one in the oven.

Wish me luck.

\[CHIMING\]

The moment of truth.

\[CHIMES AND BEEPS\]

Success, Martine. We did it.

It’s holding together.

\[RECORDER BEEPS\]

Test 243.

\[INHALES DEEPLY\]

Human trials.

\[RECORDER BEEPS\]

\[EXHALES SHARPLY\]

I’m glad it’s you.

Had a lot of other suitors, didn’t you?

Yeah.

You know, the whole near-death thing is very, very chic.

I read it in Cosmo.

\[LAUGHS\]

Do they still make Cosmo? I don’t know.

I know it’s just what you always wanted.

Could be a collector’s item one day, you never know.

This better not be my last one.

I know this is painful, but you got it.

\[GROANS SOFTLY\]

That’s it. Bingo.

Right there.

\[SHUSHES\]

\[GROANS\]

Almost there, almost there.

\[EXHALES SHARPLY\]

\[SHUSHES\]

It’s all right. Come on. Come on.

There you go.

\[GROANS SOFTLY\]

You can buckle me up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You all right? Great.

\[♪♪♪\]

\[ELECTRICITY CRACKLES\]

I call.

Bringing out the big guns.

Let’s go again.

I’ll be back. I’m gonna check on the doctor.

All right.

\[MONITOR BEEPING\]

\[DOOR CLANGS OPEN\]

You shouldn’t be down here.

I can be wherever I want, nurse.

It’s “doctor,” actually.

\[SNICKERS\]

I’m afraid you’re gonna have to leave.

Doctor. Sure, I can see it.

But, uh, you’re still the help, just like me.

Wow.

You can tell all that by just looking at me, huh?

Here I thought you were just another jacked-up dumb shit.

\[LAUGHS\]

Get out.

\[ALERT BLARING\]

Michael?

\[GUN COCKS\]

\[METAL CLANKS\]

Michael?

Where is he?

\[METAL CLANKS\]

Don’t move.

\[ROARS\]

What the hell?

Everybody down to the lab now.

\[WALKIE BEEPS\]

Roger that.

\[GRUNTS\]

Don’t shoot!

\[ALARM BLARING\]

Michael!

\[FOX GROANING\]

Stop!

\[GROWLS\]

Michael.

\[GROWLS\]

It’s just me.

\[ALARM BLARING\]

It’s just me.

\[POUNDS ON GLASS\]

Michael, please.

Michael, stop!

Stop! Please!

You’re hurting yourself! Stop!

Hey! Step back! Move!

Stop. Put that gun down…

Move!

\[GROWLING\]

\[GROANS\]

\[SCREAMS\]

\[YELLS\]

Shit. Close it! Close it!

What the hell is that thing?

\[♪♪♪\]

\[ROARS\]

Fall back! Fall back!

Shit.

MAN 1: Let’s move.

MAN 2: Go, go, go!

\[GROANS\]

Johnny!

\[GRUNTING\]

\[SCREAMS\]

\[MORBIUS GROWLS\]

Get out of here!

MAN \[OVER RADIO\]: Sweeping Level 3.

Jason, come in.

Jason. Jason?

\[SCREAMS\]

Oh, shit.

Son of a bitch!

\[GROANS\]

Shit! Oh!

Oh, shit!

\[HIGH-PITCHED SCRAPING\]

\[GROANS\]

\[GAGGING\]

\[MORBIUS GROWLS\]

\[PANTING\]

\[SCREAMS\]

\[ROARS\]

\[GASPS\]

\[♪♪♪\]

\[BREATHING HEAVILY\]

Martine.

Martine.

\[HEART BEATING STEADILY\]

\[WHISPERS\] Oh, my God.

\[VOMITS\]

\[GROANS\]

\[BREATHING HEAVILY\]

\[FEEDBACK OVER RADIO\]

Mayday, mayday, mayday.

This is the LCV Murnau.

Call letters 3-X5Y.

We are 13 nautical miles off the coast of Long Island.

Request immediate airlift.

Repeat, this is the LCV Murnau.

Mayday, mayday, mayday.

\[♪♪♪\]

It’s up here to the right.

\[PEOPLE CHATTERING INDISTINCTLY\]

FBI Agent Stroud. Can we have the room, please?

RODRIGUEZ: You heard the man. Can we please have the room?

If you could start exiting, that’d be fantastic.

Well, we haven’t had anything this good since that thing in San Francisco.

Uh, eight bodies, running IDs right now, but apparently they all shop at the same mercenary supply store.

Uh, one survivor, a Dr. Martine Bancroft.

Can we talk to her?

If she wakes up.

Uh, she fell down and hit her head, apparently.

Anything else?

Someone made a mayday call.

Not Dr. Bancroft.

Nope.

It was a male, didn’t identify himself, then wiped all the surveillance footage.

SIMON: He grew a conscience and jumped overboard?

It happens. Oh, and get this.

All the bodies that you’re looking at are nearly drained of their blood.

So, what hunts at night and drinks human blood?

You’re gonna love this.

REPORTER: Early this morning an unmanned cargo ship was discovered near the eastern tip of Long Island with multiple bodies on board.

Authorities are not making any comment at this time.

But there are reports of one survivor, and we have learned from a high-ranking Coast Guard official that the vessel was flying a Panamanian flag when it drifted in from international…

What’s happened?

Some kind of accident.

How’s your pain today? On a one to ten?

Eleven.

\[TONE SOUNDS, THEN MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY OVER PA\]

\[MONITOR BEEPING STEADILY AND VENTILATOR HISSING\]

\[TONE SOUNDS, THEN MAN SPEAKING INDISTINCTLY OVER PA\]

\[WHISPERS\] I’m sorry.

You’re going to be okay.

\[♪♪♪\]

here you all go!! also I did have to read though this whole thing to make sure it wasn’t anything bad because I actually didn’t know what Morbius was lmao and idk if this is even the whole script (also i’m so incredibly sorry to everyone…. including myself, bc my phone is glitching so badly trying to post this)

[colorful-white-ideas]

Is Bill Skarsgård only in remakes ?

This will be long. Really long.

After the relase of The crow 2024 , a lot of comments have surfaced saying that Bill only do remakes and nothing else. That he is where he is because of nepotism and that he only plays dark characters.

How about we review his trayectory according to his imdb page ? Lets see his eldest credit, how long it took him to position himself in america ( his big break) how many remakes has he done and what genres he explored.

If we go all the way down we will see that his career started in Sweden. His first credit come from the 2000's movie Järngänget where he worked with his brother Alex. Bill was 9 years old aprox. Since then he worked ocationally until his teenage years ,when he took the job more seriously , in consecuense he started to gain fame for himself in scandinavia, even nominations for some roles. Like with simple simon (I rymden finns inga känslor)

In The crown jewels ( Kronjuvelna) we have Alicia Vikander and Bill skarsgard sharing the screen, both are swedish, and later both participated in the 2012 american adaptation of Anna Karenina (Leon tolstoi novel) sadly for Bill ,being Stellan Skarsgård son did not help his small role from being cut out of the movie. Alicia is the one who gets her big break from this by playing Kitty.

Role: Captain Makhotin

But things don't end there, he may have not done it in american movies yet but he did land the role of the vampire / upir Roman Godfrey in Hemlock Grove (series), another adaptation from a book with the same name, on netflix ( small streaming plataform in the early 2010's) he did a total of 3 seasons.

In 2016 he gets another small role but in the Divergent series , in 2017 Atomic blond ( as Merkel). Now it's in 2017 at 27 years old when his first remake and big break comes: IT (pennywise) . But first lest define briefly what is a remake?

wikipedia says: A remake is a film, television series, video game, song or similar form of entertainment that is based upon and retells the story of an earlier production in the same medium—e.g., a "new version of an existing film".A remake tells the same story as the original but uses a different set of casts, and may use actors from the original, alter the theme, or change the flow and setting of the story. A similar but not synonymous term is reimagining, which indicates a greater discrepancy between, for example, a movie and the movie it is based on

It is a novel by stephen king ,the first adaptation was for tv miniseries of 2 episodes in 1990 with Tim curry as Pennywise. In 2017 another adaptation is released and here is where we open the main debate: The 2017 movie was a remake or another adaptation? I guess is matter of perspective, while is true that the first popular reference we have about the subject is the 90'series , the new production based his storyline and character design in the book... So if you are more familiar with the book you'll call it an adaptation but if you have never read it then it'll be a remake "with differences".

The contrast beetween both vertions of IT is too big to consider the latter ( 2017) a re-do/ remake of the miniseries. You can notice that just by the approach Bill and Tim took on Pennywise. Tim's version was more human, a psycopath like in John Wayne Gacy-esque type. Bill's was a monster, not one trace of humanity in his character, it was out of this world and enjoyed playin/ torturing its meals cause it tasted better basically.

My own take is that IT CHAPTER 1 AND 2 are not remakes of It (1990). But due to pop culture they are considered as such.

Between the IT- MANIA he was in the following productions: Battlecreek , deadpool 2 ( short role), Villians, Assasination nation and Castle rock ( series). He also participated in shortfilms like: A stone Appears, Alteration and Do you like the taste of beer?

Is in castle rock where he plays another creepy role as the kid .For battle creek he is an artistic vulnerable depressed dude. In assassination he plays a misogynistic teen asshole. And with Villains we see him explore his comic side.

This is what I would like to call the transition period, besides Deadpool and castle rock, all the projects previously mentioned are in some way small projects , that he for some reason decided to take on ,maybe for scheduling reasons cause by the end of 2019 IT CHAPTER 2 was premiering.

2020- 2022

The pandemic hit and changed things, he losses momentum. The whole industry was shaken actually. Movies that were supposed to be released in cinemas went to streaming, projects were cancelled and others got delayed.

For example Bill was set to work in The northman with his brother Alex again , he was already in Eggers radar, but due covid he had to drop out: Here

He left that project because something else was scheduled: Clark. (netflix nordic) a series he helped to produce too.

From this time we got Nine Days, The devil all the time (one of his best works and one of his most underrated film. He plays Willard a traumatized ww2 veteran), Soulmates (a series - one ep. He plays a uptight gay man who finds love while vacationing in Mexico), Naked Singularity ( he's an lawyer with adhd and a weird obsesion with ears) , Eternals ( KRO) ,Barbarian (horror movie where he is just a good guy who's in the wrong place at the wrong time )

By this time he was still under the shadow of " pennywise" but he had built a reputation for himself, he was a good actor before the critic and public that followed his work. Not as popular as Alex ,for example , but he was known by now.

2023 -24

After the pandemic we enter the period I woud like to call : COMEBACK.

The projects we find here are more "commercial" because these are action films, which is not bad , it was about time, most of his films usually dont get too much of exposure or are small projects. If someone said Bill Skarsgård automatically people thought in the clown 🤡 and not in Kro, mickey, willard or Clark for example. So we see here some sort of rebrandig he's now a killing machine, a cartoonish villain and anti hero.

John wick 4.

This offer came to him thanks to a previous work he did in Atomic blonde. Chad stahlesky let him choose what character play ( here) , and he went for the bad guy. A cartonish kinda old school villain , with funny accent and great suits: The marquis de Gramont.

Now, a very common observation people do is that roles are offered to him and his just takes them. That he is like a passive actor who only plays what he's tell to play, but since Pennywise he has always talked about how much he gets involved in the making of a character. The marquis was not the exception. That annoying accent was , for example, his idea. here more about it

This participation was a breath of fresh air, and brought new eyes to him. New fans arrived, people saw more of his work and he stepped a bit away from the IT shadow. Later was confirmmed that his next project would be BOY KILLS WORLD a pure gory action film with some comedic touch for which Bill prepared hard.

Moritz Mohr: Bill is a terrific actor. The only thing we weren't sure at that point was, "Can he deliver on the action?" He basically just promised, "No, I'm gonna put in the work, I'm gonna get ripped, I'm gonna train, and I'm going to learn the choreography." Which is a huge commitment, because it's just months and months of training and rehearsing, and I'm so glad that he did it. He overdelivered sometimes, he was really committed to it, and I'm very lucky that he was, because I think the results are just phenomenal.

In BKW we see Bill has good comedic timing, as if that wasn't clear with previous projects like Villains , but here he delivers comedy without talking. Conclusion : he can also be funny.

So far we are very into 2024 and NO MORE REMAKES in sight for him besides IT and we have talked about how many movies- series ? Almost 20 since his first big job in America (Hemlock G.)

The recent fame of " remake actor " comes from the next two jobs he landed. The crow 🐦‍⬛ and Nosferatu. 🦇

The crow 🐦‍⬛: How Bill got the script on his hands? it was given to him because he is known for remakes, because of his lastname , because no one else wanted to do it ? Luckily for us , Empire magazine tell us the following:

The project was conceived to be a separate work from the 1994 movie the crow, the source of inspiration was THE CROW graphic novel of J.O Barr. Again, by this and more interviews around we see Bill as an actor who played and active part in bringing a unique version of eric. From the physique ( something he kept from filming BKW) to the aura he's nothing like Brandon lee's Eric Draven.

The big differences between the 2024 and 1994 version, are confirmmed now after its release with heavy critics of people claiming it to be a "bad remake cause it looks nothing like the original " Here I ask rethorically , so is Bill a remakes actor or not?

Remakes are in full force lately, examples are whatever Disney has been doing lately, the ghostbusters, robocop , etc. Movies that go frame by frame , super close to their media source.

The same way Dune 2022 is not considered a remake of the 80's movie , The crow 2024 shouldn't be considered one either. Not even IT. Because, primarily, the source material is not the previous movie or series, but a book or a novel. So the best term to use is , I believe, adaptation or reimagining.

But what about Nosferatu?

I'm glad you asked random tumblr reader. I'm almost finishing and this is where I want to suggest that this upcoming film is actually the first remake Bill Skarsgård has done.

Robert Eggers ( director of this new remake ) shares with anOther magazine, that he planned to film Nosferatu after The witch , that's how he met Bill , who was 25 by then ( at 25-26 he was also auditioning for IT) . Eggers recalls Bill's audition being excellent for Hutter . Unfortunatelly the project fell but they stayed in contact and planned to one day work together , Bill was later set to work in the northman , we already know how that played out.

As we see here Bill was the one trying to get the opportunity to work with the director, having another role in mind ,until Eggers proposses to him the opportunity to be Count Orlok thanks to the work he did as Bob Gray in IT chapter 2.

Eggers knew about his capacities as an actor to embody darkness while having a youthful and pretty exterior that's why he tought of him as the right choice for the project.

Once again we read an interview that highlights the joint work of the director and Bill on the character, from the psyque to the make up. He was very proactive, long conversations, audio tapes, isolation, voice coach , etc. All of which finally paid off

Bill Skarsgård has proven his desire to become a versatile actor, just by reading his imdb page we see a variety of works forming his resumee , but he has a particular preference for dark, scary , creepy roles. In this review since the Hemlock grove days he has played a total of 7 obscure characters ( from antagonist to conflicted ones). This alone is not bad, and they aren't that many either. Every actor have a genre they prefer , characters they feell more pulled to work with. Bill is a goth king and I respect that.

His career itself also proves to be the result of organic growth, although he was lucky to be part of one of the most successful and respected acting families in sweden , that alone couldn't have granted him is current success. He started in America with a small show that most people haven't heard of till this day, and was in his late 20's when he got his first big opportunity. He sent emails, he sent tapes, he auditioned, he gave his word promising to deliver a good job. He works his ass off for what he wants. He doesn't seem to be the classic textbook nepobaby.

That's why I think that considering him just a remake actor is unfair and narrow minded. Said statement reduces a still growing career full of exploration to just opportunistics cashagrab roles ... and this guy is far from being that. Also because not everything that shares a tittle or character's names is a remake. It dependes on what the creators are having in mind for the new work.

That's so , after reading the most recent AnOther magazine interview , that I came to the conclusionI expressed before: Nosferatu is his first remake . Both Bill and Robert Eggers have always in mind the 1922 movie as source of reference and they worked Count Orlok and the story around that.

He's still a rising star, and has a lot more ahead, im confident the general public will see what directors and fans have seen in him: A good mfucking actor who wants to leave a mark but in his own terms. Taking risks , exploring, chosing roles that may not look right for him but always improving himself to expand his potential and keep taking on new and more promising challenges.

Its intersting how everything connects , IT oppened the door of Nosferatu. After all the issues that came to him at the right time , and I can bet my left arm he will deliver !

*Im sorry if this was too long it took me 2 days finishing it ,i'll go to sleep now .

[vikings-til-valhalla]

Heyoo I'm Jay and I'm non-binary and follow Loki, Freya and Thor. Not quite great at it but still. One thing I'd like to know is.. is Valhalla pretty much a Ragnarok training camp? I'm hoping I go to be with Hel.

So the short answer: it is that exactly, but also so much more.

Long answer is:

Valhalla is the land of honored dead who fell in combat. Yes, a majority of the depictions is explaining how the halls are full of battle and preparation for Ragnarok, and that Odin chooses the valiant slain during combat for the reason that they are powerful fighters and therefore worthy. But it's also about comradery and kinship, merriment, and celebration.

Other depictions of Valhalla portray it just as much a place of endless celebration where one who is chosen goes to revel with others in eternal glory and joy for the heroic warring deeds they did while alive. Everyone is together in these celebrations, and the sense of unity is immense. It's the place where legends never die, and tales are told eternally.

It's true that Valhalla is the place of battle and preparation for the ultimate fight, namely because those who died fighting are the chosen. But just as any warrior would do with their bands of siblings in arms, it's a place to celebrate your victories because, in the days of pre-Christian Scandinavia, death was seen more as a victory not a defeat. It was valor to die fighting for your clan and kin.

Hence you get things like the Havamal stanza 75 (pitt.edu translation): "Cattle die and kinsmen die, / thyself too soon must die, / but one thing never, I ween, will die, -- / fair fame of one who has earned."

Overall to understand the true purpose of Valhalla, you have to have an understanding of the life and facts of life that were during this time period. Much of the gods' tales across all accounts are about the inevitably of death and embracing it because nothing is eternal, and death is a given. Everything ends. Death is an end. But endings are a new beginning, and that new beginning can be beautiful. It's a chance for something better and greater to take the place of what was. And Valhalla as a concept shows us that we must revel in the glory of what was, and celebrate those who've done great things. And when the time comes for things to end, so be it. Joy and prosperity had their time and place, and a new life for other joy and prosperity will be born.

That isn't to say that Helheim and other lands are dishonorable and valor-less, though.

Just the same as Valhalla, it's often depicted that Helheim is a place where all others ascend who are not dishonored, and who Odin does not choose. This, therefore, includes the musicians, poets, artists, ethicists, scholars, anyone and everyone at all who simply lived an honorable life and died without being in combat. Legend lives elsewhere as much as it does in Valhalla, it's just simply in another form that isn't war and physical might.

I don't recall which sources I'd read from for this. But some folks choose to believe that the artistic people of Hel's realm are the ones who write songs and draw portraits of the legendary warriors of Valhalla. And others choose to imagine it holds the most intelligent of debates!

Whereas battle and merriment are the place of Valhalla, Helheim is the place of peace and honor. It was Christian depictions specifically which put Helheim in a poor light and made it seem like a desolate, torturous place akin to their land of hell, which, from what I understand, experienced a similar thing as a result of the crusaders, though I'm not Christian so I truly can't confirm or deny that.

But in the end, it's honorable to be chosen by either Odin or Hel, and if you have no desire to be a fighter in the end days, you have no obligation to be. Just as the skalds carried forth the legends, and scholars taught the wisdom sought by many, and crafters made the tools and clothes for survival, and cooks made the food and drink needed for sustenance, Hel understands everyone has a purpose and that this purpose isn't always living and dying to fight. She provides a place to keep those people after death where they, too, can be honored and together just as Valhalla, only without the violence.

So to sum it up: Valhalla is a place of celebration with combat. Helheim is a place for all non-warriors, and without combat and war.

I'm sorry this was so long, but I hope I answered your question well enough at least!

[babylon-crashing]

Q: why is the grim reaper traditionally portrayed as a man?

Based on some of the replies to this question I’m always amazed at folks who don’t understand symbolism and metaphors. There’s a reason why we call it the personification of death and not some living flesh and blood monstrosity that will allow you to make generalizations about a concept that is, in fact, genderless.

A tiny glance around the world will show that there are just as many female psychopomps of death as there are male. Santa Muerte (Mexican folk saint), Mictecacihuatl (Aztec), La Calavera Catrina (Day of the Dead), Izanami (Shinto), Giltinė (Latvia), Banshee (Gaelic), Hel (Scandinavia) and Morana (Slavic tradition) are all female versions of death’s embodiment. I’ll go so far as to say that the whole concept of the Grim Reaper is a rather new invention, since, “The earliest appearance of the name ‘Grim Reaper’ in English is in the 1847 book ‘The Circle of Human Life’ … [and] because the word for death [in Polish] ‘śmierć’ is feminine in gender, death is frequently portrayed as a skeletal old woman.”

I guess a slightly larger question for me is the most obvious: the Grim Reaper is a skeleton in robes … how well versed in human anatomy do you have to be in order to tell its gender from nothing more than a skull and some boney hands?

The version I’m using for the Seven of Swords is Rán, the Norse sea goddess, who collects the drowned in a fishing net.

[moobell55]

The Valor Families Name Meanings

I feel like we as readers don't talk about how cool the Valors are, they're the oldest and first ruling family or the North. Not to mention Wolfric ascended the throne without any violence simply because his wife asked him too. Not to mention have mythical powers and being apart of many Northern Legends. So here's a little Valor application.

Wolfric Valor- A German name in origin meaning "Wolf Power or Wolf Ruler." Wolfric is an imposing man, one of the most gifted fighters the North had ever seen and the first to reunite the fighting clans. Wolfric often disregarded the opinions of his family, which in turn led to terrible consequences for the family. He claimed his youngest child Aurora was "A silly girl who knew nothing of love," because she did not want to marry Vengeance Slaughterwood. He also ignored his wife's worries that betrothing Vengeance and Aurora was a bad idea, in return his son Castor and Lyric Merrywood died. However he cares deeply for his family and made sure they were protected once they awoke from their sleep, he also made quick work in taking back the throne from the Acadians.

Honora Valor- A name Latin in origin meaning "Honor or Women of Honor," often giving to babies as a sign of cherishment. Honora is a great health and one of the Greatest rulers of the North, Evangeline herself said that Honor carried herself proudly, and looked like she belonged on a battlefield more than a ballroom. She is a Wise woman and knew that the choice her husband made regarding Aurora betrothal was a poor one. She cares deeply for her children going as far as bringing Castor back from the dead. Evangeline says that Honora is an excellent Hugger.

Vesper Valor- A name Latin in origin meaning "Evening Star or Evening Prayer," Vesper is the Roman meaning of "Hesperus" which is Planet Venus during Sunset. Vesper has an ability to see into the future and provide prophecies but cannot fully understand what they mean.

Tempest Valor- Orgining from early Gaul languages meaning, "Stormy or Turbulent," Tempest is the twin brother of Romulus, both brothers are said to be the creators of the Valory Arches along with incredible inventors. It is my belief that Tempest and Romulus built Castor's helm to keep him from feeding.

Romulus Valor- Latin in origin, meaning "Child of Rome," in myth and historical beliefs Romulus was the first King of Rome, and was raised by the she-wolf Lupa, in myth he was the twin of Remus. Romulus is the twin brother of Tempest Valor, both are renowned inventors in the North. It is my belief that Romulus and Tempest built the Helm so Castor could no longer feed.

Dane Valor- English and Hebrew in origin, Dane means, "From Denmark," in English but in The Torah and Hebrew tradition means, "God is my judge." The Danes were an ethnic group that were Northen Germanic but inhabited much of Scandinavia. Dane Valor is a shapeshifter, he commonly took the form of a dragon and no other shifting forms were mentioned. In many forms of Dane history their versions of dragons were said to be long and serpent-like along with being incredibly venomous. Dane is shown to be a brute in the series, and Evangeline is confused on why Lala liked him.

Lysander Valor- A Greek name meaning, "Liberator." Lysander is said to have the power of "Memories," the full length or direct skill of these powers was never explained. He was never mentioned much throughout the series but seemed to have a close relationship with his brother Dane; the two of them together seemed to be fond of tormenting Jacks.

Castor Valor- A name Greek in origin, "Beaver," Castor in the Mythos was the twin brother of Pollux, both brothers making up the Gemini constellation. In the books Young Castor is never mentioned to have a direct power, but was described as being extremely Noble and Clever. Before he was killed he had a vast network of spies and assassins that worked for him; many of these now being his Vampire Clan. Castor is the twin brother of Aurora Valor but the two seemed to have a rough relationship as Castor thought her annoying.

Aurora Valor- Latin for the word "Dawn," in myth the Goddess Aurora announced the Dawn each day. The Tears of the Goddess Aurora were said to be the morning dew that fell to Earth. Aurora Valor is described as being the Most Beautiful girl in the Magnificent North, she was very aware of this fact. While her family believed that she pissed no powers Aurora taught herself Witchcraft, she cursed Jacks out of jealousy. Aurora is the Twin sister of Castor Valor and the youngest sibling in the Valor Family. Aurora believes that her father, Wolfric, likes her sister Vesper more since she wasn't forced into a betrothal to Vengeance Slaughterwood.

[hippopotatoe]

I only know about ö, æ, and å from the song~ If it pleases you, tell me about their history?

i have literally no idea what song you're talking about but okay, buckle up, long semi unhinged rant abt letters ahead!

so. the alphabet. what a concept. we learn it, we love it, blah blah blah. let's not get into the history here, just accept the latin a-z modern alphabet with it's 26 letters. well. some countries have more than 26 letters. many countries have extra letters (usually existing letters with addendums) which have their own unique sounds and are learned as if they were their own unique letters (which they are!) but not officially part of the alphabet. why? eh, varies. some languages have so many extras to so many letters that it simply would be too much of a trouble to separate what are unique letters and what are pronounciation guides. some probably have other reasons. i mean, some countries have 26 letter simply because of tradition (ask any swede to say the alphabet and they'll miss w 99% of the time, because it's a completely surperflous letter which should stop existing in our alphabet and just file under v. but whatever).

anyway. some countries have extra letters. german have ä, ö and ü, which are learned as their own letter bc of their unique sounds, but are filed under a, o and u in the dictionary. scandinavia have å, ä/æ and ö/ø, and they are treated as separate letters in the alphabet, which gives our alphabets 29 letters (should be 28 but WHATEVER). they have completely unique sounds in our languages, so why should they be treated as anything but unique letters? please note that ä and æ are literally the same letters. same with ö and ø

and here. HERE is where i get emotional: the differences in how and why sweden and denmark+norway write their "extra" letters

for as long as people have had writing, we have changed how we write. fonts are nothing new. every day we read three completely different looking version of the letter a without batting an eye. the way letters look are constantly evolving. and once upon a time in the 1500's there was a style called fraktur developed in germany. nothing new under the sun, someone wanted a font that looked cool, the style continued to develop alongside the "normal" looking latin alphabet, and eventually fraktur was seen as obsolete and phased out. but one thing fraktur was very good at, was combining letters into one to save space. it made sense for letters that was often written next to each other to make certain sounds to be written as one symbol. in fraktur there is a symbol that means tz, there is one that means ck, one that meant sz and so on... and some combos stuck. the symbol that simply was a space saving mashup of s and z eventually became the german letter ß (which is now being phased out afaik). however... fraktur wasn't the first style to do this. we already had æ

at some point, someone in germany decided that you know what? æ and œ actually still takes up unnecessary space. we want them to be even more compact; out with the middle ages, in with the new. we have a writing style that is so fucking good at mashing up letters and we don't like how someone else have done that already, we want to be the best. the best way to do this was apparently by looking at another old way of giving letters unique sounds by drawing lines above them, and modernized it by put e above o and a. like just. a teeny tiny e floating above a and o. which sweden thought was kinda cool looking. we were a very modern and cool country after all. this eventually resulted in people writing two lines or dots above them rather than a full on e, which became the ä and ö we know and love today. but in denmark and norway people apparently was fine with the way æ looked (or they were just really really conservative and didn't want to throw out a several hundred year old letter), but they agreed that œ was a waste of space, but that swedes were tools for following germany, and they came up with their own solution by shoving the letters together completely. e overlayed on o became ø. æ stayed as æ. and then all three of us turned our heads to germany and said "but you know what? we DO have a sound which kinda sorta sounds like aa or ao, but we have no way of really writing that beside á which could also have other sounds which just makes things kinda confusing. and germany do actually have a neat little thing going on with the lil' e on top of another letter. should we maybe... invent the letter å?" and then we did

and i just find it beautiful how swedish, norweigan and danish, three languages that are so close they would be dialects if we weren't separate countries, looked at the same unique sounds which we wrote in the same way, and said hey. let's make them into proper letters. and then we solved it in two completely separate ways.

next up: watch me cry over how different languages pronounce the same letters

[umseb]

"And at some point I thought: Stop, something is wrong here" – Sebastian Vettel in his first conversation since hisdrawal from Formula 1

He is a four-time Formula 1 world champion and lives in Switzerland. Vettel explains how racing and ecological responsibility go together. And: Will he even return to the premier class?

Mr. Vettel, have you already done something good for the environment today? I was on the bike. Theoretically, I have produced electricity with it, but it is not being fed into the grid yet. However, I made more CO2 in that hour than if I had stayed in bed. But what I find exciting is what resonates with this question: always having to do something good and talk about it. That's not the central point for me. It is important that everyone has a healthy attitude towards the fact that our world is in trouble and what can do to prevent it from getting even worse. It's about attitude, not about one good deed every day.

Would you rather do good and not talk about it? In fact, you become a little more cautious when you talk with enthusiasm and conviction about how you have changed your behavior or what else is going through your head, then you often immediately get the finger wagged. I'm not even interested in the obvious things like solar systems or electric cars. What is much more important is the fact that you take a closer look at many things, become aware of something, and then question your own behavior patterns or decisions.

But you actually do good, as we know. I have trouble walking past something that others have dropped, be it a piece of trash or even just plastic. I wonder what must be going on with people who just throw things out the car window and why people don't even think a step further. It's not correct to expect that anyone will abolish it at some point.

Is this how you raise your children too? Of course that carries over. When we walk through the forest together and they see a candy wrapper lying there, they shout: Is that necessary? But I don't want the walk together to be colored negatively by only remembering this one thing that wasn't nice - and not the good air or the funny cloud. Behavioral patterns can be inspiring when I see that the little one are already dealing with packaging waste differently.

The racing drivers used to move to beautiful Thurgau because it is so close to the airport. How are you traveling? Many people have this classic image in their heads: He's a racing driver, so he always drives a car, and always always. But to be honest: I don't have that need. It was certainly different when I had just gotten my driver's license. By the way, today I prefer driving a car again than when I was active in Formula 1; I can enjoy it more. Before I get on a plane today, I tend to take the car.

Do cars even have a future in private transport? Of course, in Switzerland we are very spoiled when it comes to public transport - because it works. I really enjoy taking public transport, especially when I want to go to Zurich. You can get anywhere in Thurgau, but it just takes a little longer. Where I live there is nothing except a mailbox and a bus stop.

A four-time Formula 1 world champion can do that so easily? Of course, I have no problem with it at all. I also don't understand when other well-known people develop a paranoia that they could be recognized or harasssed. I always tell them: Yes, you too can take the bus or train. Of course I'm not Roger Federer, it's probably a little different for him. But I think people mostly travel because they want to go somewhere, not because they want to recognize anyone.

Lewis Hamilton once told the NZZ that what he appreciated about his time in Zurich was that he was able to move around in peace most of the time. For me it's the Swiss mentality, which requires more discretion. At the beginning no one knew me anyway because I was way too young. And the country is not necessarily a Formula 1 hotspot since. But even when I was traveling in Scandinavia with my VW bus and family last year, I didn't have any unpleasant encounters.

Bus, VW bus – is that your new pace of life? Yes, my pace has slowed extremely. There are already things that I miss. But that doesn't mean I miss the adrenaline rush from speed. I lived for the moment, the competition. That's what I miss most. As intense and as fast-paced as my old life was, I am sometimes surprised that I can cope with the slowness so well now. Everything adapts to the family’s pace. With children you need and learn patience. I'm more surprised that some people think: once a racing driver, always a racing driver. I never fit into many of the clichés anyway; I rather enjoyed things that were considered boring.

Are you looking for freedom on your camping trips? I not only want to gain freedom, but I also want to pass on the freedom that I had and have to my children. It's different to read about sea creatures in a book than to stand in the North Sea and see the lugworm in real life.

But the extreme tension in motorsport, this total focus, is it so easy to get away from it? It's a process, and it's probably still ongoing for me. Sometimes I miss the tension from the old world. But my days are still full. I still haven't found the time for a lot of the things I wanted to do. The result in sport is everything, and because I come from this very extrinsic world, I can say: I don't have that much to show for it after I left Formula 1.

Can you explain that in a little more detail? This constant evaluation from outside that I had since I was a child has completely disappeared; there are no longer any results lists lists. I have a lot of ideas and I'm doing a lot more things than in all the years before. I wanted exactly this idle time in which I didn't immediately dive into the next full-time job. I thought about quitting for several years. And at some point you can no longer push away the thought of ending your career. I'm busy translation this passion that I lived out in motorsport into another language and finding something new. Neverthertheless, knowing that the new thing may never trigger the same feeling as before.

There are skiers who stop and then start racing cars. When I go skiing, I so almost go. But I don't just shoot to be the fastest, I have more fun with the swings. There are many things I try my hand at. For example, I really enjoy working with wood. I would like to be more perfect at this, and of course I get annoyed when something doesn't work right away. But how can it be, the first time? But your own personality is somehow part of everything.

What is your yardstick for a happy day today? It starts with asking yourself questions: What does happiness mean? What is satisfaction? What do I want to do with my life? That is a very great good.

Do you like being a family person? It was a very conscious decision to start a family back then. At 26, I was very young by today's standards. I remember when our first daughter was born, I read in a brochure at the hospital that babies can sleep up to 20 hours a day. Great, I said to my wife, it's working. Well, we didn't have a brochure child. It took three years for her to sleep through the night.

Did you give up a lot because of motorsport? When you're in the machinery of sport, it just keeps going. I was amazed at how much I was traveling, even though I always spent as much time at home as possible and gave up a lot of things to do so. Now that I actually have more time, other relationships with the children are developing. I can tell a bedtime story every night instead of just twice a week. When we go to museums, I can see how children see the world. I find that really exciting, so because there is a lot of identity in it. On the one hand, your own influence, on the other hand, the influence from outside. It also makes me question myself.

Your identity is that of a champion. Part of the exciting part is the question of what that did to me, how my world was shaped by it. I think I lived it very intensively. And I can well understand if someone wants more and more joy and success and even becomes addicted to it. But I always had a healthy distance from it; my identity didn't depend too much on it.

What caused you to become more interested in the environment than in motorsport? There wasn't a moment when it clicked for me. As you get older, you perceive things differently and more strongly. When we talk about the future in Formula 1, we mean the next season or the season after that. Everything else was very abstract, the future was just a dictionary definition. But hey presto you have children, you want to be there for them and if possible protect them for the rest of their lives. Life happens, this is how a real future is created, the word becomes plastic. And at some point I thought: Stop, something is wrong here. What is actually going on with our world? Isn't there much more important than what has been been important to me so far? I am a very curious person and am quick to ask questions of myself and others. And suddenly a huge world opened up in front of me - with huge problems. Bigger than just the problem of making a racing car faster. I started to become really interested in politics for the first time.

That sounds like a radical change. Starting with the question: What is my life anyway? What is this footprint everyone is talking about? How do you measure it? I did some research and started writing down how I get around. And as soon as I collected data and information, I started to change my life. I stopped flying on a private jet, which used to be common practice due to time constraints and comfort. Lo and behold, it wasn't a problem to stand in line with everyone else at the airport. Twelve hours in the car to Barcelona didn't hurt my race preparation; we actually enjoyed stopping along the way and discovering Avignon, for example. The things I gave up were not freedoms, but habits.

But for many drivers, owning a car means freedom. Most cars are parked 98 percent of the time, so they are more like stationary vehicles than vehicles. But what would would our cities look like if intelligent mobility, e.g. no longer needed parking garages? There wants be radical changes in the cityscape, like when cars replaced horses. I understand that many people are afraid when something changes. But they miss the opportunity to see how much better things could be for them if cities become more livable, safer and cleaner. Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those people who groans when a car drives past me and immediately feels sick.

Back to our problems: Is e-mobility the solution? I believe it is a solution. It makes sense, especially the efficiency of the drive speaks for it. There is still a lot of movement on the topic, including when it comes to questions about raw materials, disposal and the energy required during production. But the materials for the combustion engine also come from somewhere. The electric car makes perfect sense in cities, and it will play a central role elsewhere too. The range can be planned; very few people get up in the morning and say: Today I want to spontaneously go to Paris and back again. As far as the supposed lack of emotions when driving, I can tell you: Yes, you feel something. I actually don't want to drive anything else, it's so pleasant to drive. There are still challenges, but they can be solved. The question is: what would be the alternative?

They are working on synthetic fuels and are even demonstrating them in Formula 1 racing cars. All of us, individually and as a society, must have found a solution to all the emissions we create because of the way we move, the way we live or what we eat. There are already a lot of options, and it would just be lazy to say: That doesn't work. Synthetic fuels are a bridging technology; hydrogen, with or without combustion engines, or fuel cells can be the solution for heavy transport. We just need to redouble our efforts to move away from the old. There is no silver bullet to solving problems, which we always dreamed of in Formula 1.

You have also invested yourself in a Swiss company that stores carbon dioxide in stone. There are always many exciting approaches. I looked at what the Climeworks company is doing in Iceland; it works very well there due to the geological conditions. If you are interested in something like that, you automatically slide into other subject areas.

Have you ever thought about visiting ETH? It is represented in practically all future fields. I'm still deciding whether and if so, what I should study. After graduating from high school it would have been mechanical engineering, but that would be too dry for me today. Maybe I would rather do something creative, with my hands.

Maybe an apprenticeship instead of studying? I have already taken a few courses in agriculture. I came to the topic through nutrition, which is extremely important for professional athletes. Of course I had heard that organic is better. But what exactly is organic, why is it better, what do they do differently? During Corona I did a small internship on a farm. There is something grounding about it in the best sense of the word. Being a farmer is a great job. And I think it's a shame that he isn't sufficiently appreciated in our society.

How do you feel about Formula 1? Are you even watching anymore? Yes I do. I wanted to try withdrawal at the first Grand Prix after my last race. I actually didn't watch the training, but shortly before qualifying I had to give in and tuned in. I also watched the race. It wasn't as strange a feeling as I had previously thought, watching and no longer sitting in the car. I then saw a few races throughout the year, or at least watched the highlights. Because of course I'm still interested in the sport, even if I'm no longer that close to it. I watch with my wife and usually comment unconsciously. She says it's the first time she's really understood the sport. And if I'm right with a pit strategy, then it'll go down like oil.

Is it still appropriate to watch men driving around in circles for an hour and a half? I'm far too close to say it isn't. I love this sport, it is so multifaceted and full of depth. But I also understand that many things are too complex to be understood in an hour and a half. For me the fascination is still there. But of course I'm not neutral since.

Do you have a favorite that you're keeping your fingers crossed for? Last year belonged to Max Verstappen. Of course some people find it boring, but I think it doesn't give enough respect and recognition to his achievements. I, for one, at the full of admiration. Even for someone like the ski racer Marco Odermatt. It's not that the others are doing something wrong, they really try everything. But Max and Marco do it so much better. They give the sport its shine. That excites me. So because I still know what success feels like.

So no boredom at all? Everyone has their own view of tension. Someone from England recently asked me: “Say, skiing, can you watch it on TV?” I said: “Sure, it’s a great thing here, in Austria and Switzerland it’s the national sport.” He replied: "That's really boring, you're just racing against the clock." I said: 'Yes, but you see in which position someone is driving and this and that. . .» To which he said: “Okay, but they don’t race against each other.”

Are your children actually allowed to watch the Netflix series “Drive to Survive”? You haven't asked for it yet. But I only watched one episode when the series came out. I found it a bit strange because it was so unrealistic. But of course I understand that it has brought a lot of attention and a new audience to motorsport. This is not possible with hours of explanations about how to adjust a damper. On Netflix, viewers feel like they're learning more, partly because there's more drama. But when I feel the need to find out more about the current Formula 1, I don't reach for the remote control, I reach for the telephone.

Formula 1 cannot ignore climate change. I have very strong opinions about what Formula 1 was, what it is and what it can be. Big sports are also big platforms; they can achieve a lot of positive things because they reach so many people. That's why I believe that this brings with it a great responsibility. Formula 1 can no longer avoid the big issues of our time. I still remember what was drilled into us during the media training in the young talent series: don't take a position on the topics of sex, money and politics, don't have an opinion, and ideally don't say anything. Nobody can afford that anymore, especially not an entire sport. There are already issues that Formula 1 has to address.

That would be? The type of vehicle drive is crucial, even if cars only make up a small part of the emissions. But the engine shapes the image. I see this as a huge opportunity for Formula 1 to set a good example instead of just harping on about something old. Otherwise I see a great danger that motorsport will be threatened with extinction in the long term if it continues to involve things that are no longer accepted by society. In Germany this can already be felt to a certain extent; the hype no longer exists. Is that just because no German is winning at the moment, or is the country a little further along in this respect and is dealing with other issues?

Would you be interested in becoming the environmental ambassador for the series? Change has to come from within, skiers are the best example. When I talk to people from the ski circuit, they see how climate change is affecting the racing calendar. In Formula 1, the race in Imola had to be canceled because the soil could no longer absorb the rain and the entire region was flooded. And in Canada only the wind would have had to change and the smoke from the nearby forest fires would have made a race impossible. A lot of money is involved in motorsport. Taking care of certain things costs money, but it has to be included. Last year I carefully started raising awareness myself with a small project to protect insects. The loss of biodiversity is a very serious issue. I also have some ideas for the new season. That's why I'm talking to Formula 1 boss Stefano Domenicali about what can be done.

One last question about career orientation: With Lewis Hamilton's move to Ferrari in 2025, a lot will shift in Formula 1. How close are you to a comeback? I was surprised by this change. Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff didn't call me, but we briefly exchanged text messages. But so far it's not an issue for me, because at 36 I still have all the time in the world. So this doesn't go away. But my signs haven't changed. I think that I have learned and understood a lot in this one year without racing, including about myself. Being on the other side had a big impact on me; a lot of questions came up. So far there is no active project.

Is that a clear no now? No. I already said back then that there wouldn't be clear no in that sense, because I already said back then that there wouldn't't be clear no in that sense, because I believe that everything is a process. And maybe there will come a point at which I say: Yes, I would like to go back. When I sort it out mentally so that it suddenly makes sense again. But at the moment I'm doing very well without driving in Formula 1. There is no firm no, but also no firm yes.

Are you doing something good for yourself today? I'm going for a medical check-up now. This is mandatory if you want to keep your racing license.

[hetalian-veteran]

GUYS

Remember this post I made where I talked about my ethnicity estimate from an AncestryDNA test I took years ago?

Well, the app, as well as the ethnicity estimates for its users, will occasionally update. This is because the people at Ancestry are always refining their work to make things more accurate. However, through all the updates, my estimate hasn't changed much. It actually hasn't changed at all in the last two years.

Until its most recent update. LOOK.

THERE'S MORE!

Granted I lost Denmark, and I'm assuming Iceland as well, seeing as it's no longer lit up (sad day). But it seems like I have more Germanic Europe than I thought I did! Which is exciting to me, but not just because I love researching family history, and not just because I've been learning German for a while now.

But because growing up, my grandpa on my mom's side of the family insisted that we had ancestors that came from the Kingdom of Prussia. Which, as we all know, is Germanic.

Now, I'm not saying this update outright confirms this theory. Mainly because my grandpa, God rest his soul, really liked to spin all kinds of wild tales. So, it's wise to take some of his stories with claims with a grain of salt. But by golly, I feel like this might add a little bit of truth to it! And as someone who has loved both aph Prussia, as well as learning the real-life country's history since I was twelve, this feels like a big deal to me.

Also... Portugal? Which parent did I get that from?

Nothing against Portugal, of course. I'm just kind of floored as I was not expecting this. Like, The Netherlands is also a new one from this update. But seeing how close The Netherlands is to Germanic Europe, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, I get it. But Portugal? Granted its only one percent, but I am beyond curious now!

Also, I am still very happy to see not only the new additions to my ethnicity estimate as I explore my background, but I'm happy to see that the British Isles as well as Norway and Sweden have stuck around. I love them.

I have been seriously considering drawing a piece of art that includes all of the countries I've found in my background using the Hetalia characters. And I'm glad I didn't start that project before the update, because there's a lot more here than before. Especially when you look at the map and see what countries are covered by Germanic Europe.

For now, here are the flags of countries I know my ancestry is from. I'd post the aph characters, but Tumblr has a picture limit.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇮🇪🇳🇴🇸🇪🇵🇹🇩🇪🇳🇱

And then here's where I think I might have ancestry from.

🇦🇹🇧🇪🇫🇷🇱🇺🇨🇭🇱🇮

I sorta just want to claim all of them 😆

Oh, and as always...

🦅🇺🇸I'M AN AMERICAN🇺🇸🦅

[almostarchaeology]

The Brooch of the Dragon

By Adrián Maldonado

The gift and the curse of being a medievalist is that watching fantasy fiction adaptations can feel a bit like taking your job home with you. You’re still able to be a fan, but you’re also hyper-aware of the real-world inspirations for settings, props and storylines. You’re at an elevated risk of taking to social media and posting about it. 

Despite being set in the ancient past of Westeros, I never really get the sense of HBO’s House of the Dragon series as a particularly archaeological story. Sure, there’s occasional ruins like Harrenhal, and some ancient artefacts, but otherwise there’s very little of that sense of the past irrupting into the present that we associate with archaeology.  

But then in Season 2, right from the first episode, one aspect of HotD jumped out to me, and it seems like it was just me. There was a real, shocking intrusion of real-world archaeology into this fictional past.

A shocking intrusion (source)

Episode 1 opens up north at the Wall, where two of the realm’s young lords, Cregan Stark and Jacaerys Velaryon, inspect the Night’s Watch. Cregan’s costume and accent ring all sorts of nostalgia bells for fans of the antecedent Game of Thrones series. Jacaerys (or Jace for short) is less awesomely attired, but his woolly black cloak is pinned across his chest with a striking ring-shaped brooch.  

And I thought, hey, I know you.  

Since last I wrote on these pages, I have become a museum nerd, and have written a book on Viking Age artefacts in Scotland. This involved poring over museum catalogues and excavation reports to become fluent in the visual language of early medieval Europe. There’s lots of ways to be an archaeologist, as covered in nerdy detail on these pages, but dammit, nothing beats the thrill of studying an artefact made, worn and loved a thousand years ago.  

And every once in a great while, you get artefacts that reach out from beyond their museum cases and sneak into the zeitgeist. The Lewis Chessmen pop up in Hogwarts; the Sutton Hoo helmet gets everywhere. But I’m declaring the 2020s the age of the pop culture penannular brooch.  

Introducing the penannular brooch 

Aldclune, Perthshire penannular brooch, National Museums Scotland

Back in the first millennium AD, in the lands which would become Scotland, Ireland and Wales, anyone who was anyone wore a brooch in the shape of an open ring, fitted with a loose pin which speared through the cloth. Twist the hoop, and the pin anchors the fabric in place: a simple but ingenious way of fastening a cloak.  

I often see these described as ‘Celtic’ brooches, but in the world of costume jewellery, it seems you can call anything ‘Celtic’ as long as you throw some interlace or knotwork decoration on it. We’re better off calling them by their name: penannular brooches, defined by hoops with a gap, hence pen-, or almost, annular. 

In Roman and Iron Age Britain, these were mainly small and utilitarian [Editor's note: after this was posted, I spotted a Roman penannular brooch as worn by General Acacius, as played by Pedro Pascal, in Gladiator II], but by the early medieval period (c AD 400-1100), penannular brooches had grown into big silver jobs with enlarged and ornate terminals. A cloak pinned with one these bad boys was the business suit of its day, with the slight difference that instead of just buying one, you had to earn it, and only a restricted few had access to the best craftspeople. The moulds for casting these metal brooches are found almost exclusively at royal fortresses. 

These brooches remained fashionable for centuries, evolving all along the way. One of the most dramatic left-turns in the penannular brooch journey came at the start of the Viking Age. In Scandinavia, the most elaborate brooches had mainly been for women. But when Scandinavians came raiding to the Insular world of Britain and Ireland, they saw both men and women wearing these distinctive ring-shaped brooches, and they wanted them. Bad.  

Ball-type silver brooch from the Skaill Hoard, Orkney, National Museums Scotland

The result is that the archaeological record for these centuries is suddenly awash with brooches: looted brooches found in viking graves, as well as hoards of brooches stashed away so vikings wouldn’t get them. By the end of the ninth century, new kinds of penannular brooches began to be made in Scandinavia. This new generation of Insular-Scandinavian brooches grew larger, sometimes to ludicrous sizes, to suit the lavish taste of these new-money overlords.  

And then, a thousand years later, after a long day of not finishing papers about brooches that I’m terribly late on, I sit down on the couch to chill with some HotD, and out pops Jacaerys, wearing my homework across his chest. 

Casting fantasy jewellery 

Superman Targaryen (source)

It was a few years ago I started noticing the return of penannular brooches to a wider consciousness mainly through the fantasy genre. My nerdier friends were chatting about the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher. I didn���t know anything about the books, I just knew the lead guy was the actor then playing Superman in films which I also didn’t care for, but now with a long platinum wig that made him look like the Vampire Lestat on a high-protein diet.  

Despite having no knowledge or interest in the series, my eye caught on a weird feature of Lead Guy’s sword. Why did Superman Targaryen have what looked for all the world like the 9th-century Snåsa brooch glued to his sword hilt?  

Insular brooch from Snåsa, Nord-Trøndelag, Oslo Kulturhistorisk Museum

Apparently, the script called for Medieval Point Break to carry the brooch of someone he kills in the first episode (I couldn’t be bothered getting into it, but I think there’s answers here). The prop department chose a real archaeological artefact, a ‘Celtic’ brooch from a Viking woman’s grave in Norway, to play the part of a medieval-ish fantasy-looking jewel. Which is odd because the big, yellow brooch makes it look like he’s got a big smiley emoji following him around. But hey, it made me look. 

The thing about fantasy adaptations is that they have to feel ‘right’, and that usually entails feeling vaguely medieval. So you tell your costume designer to scout for something a bit different – something that will feel medieval but less familiar, even a bit strange. They go to museums and ‘audition’ all sorts of ancient accessories, and it's often the early medieval period that gets the part. Torturing this metaphor then allows me to make a genius pun about ‘casting’ penannular brooches in prestige fantasy adaptations, for which YOU ARE WELCOME. 

The Northman: authenticity Olympics (source)

2022 was basically the penannular brooch singularity. The Viking-age historical fiction film The Northman came out that year, and the press around it was that this was basically the authenticity Olympics, with a tidal wave of interviews on all the research and experts they used to build their period-specific costumes and sets. To my delight, there were tons of penannular brooches to ogle in the film (which is all good until you get to Iceland where they mainly used pins instead of brooches, but I’ll let it go this time).  

Our guy Arondir

Then the streaming wars escalated to the level of Rings of Power on Amazon Prime. In season 1, they introduced us to both Baby Elrond and my guy Arondir wearing ‘Celtic’-inspired penannular brooches, recognizable in form but pleasingly Tolkienesque in design. 

And so we come to HotD. For season 2, new costume designer Caroline McCall dutifully searched for archaeological inspiration.  

“I like costumes to feel like clothes and not costumes that the actors have to wear when they become the characters. So I started looking at ancient civilizations, medieval dress and how the clothes could be constructed so that everything felt real in the time period.” - Caroline McCall

To do so, she visited the British Museum, and came up with objects which combined early medieval “Celtic”, Roman and Viking styles, but still fit in with the kinds of jewellery used in season 1, and the visual world of Westeros as established across 8 seasons of Game of Thrones. Brooches fit the bill, and specifically, penannular ones. One of the first we see in the first episode of season 2 was Jacaerys’s brooch.  

If it was just that one thing, it would hardly be enough to write home about, much less come back and revive this blog for. But then I spotted another, and another. The whole rest of the season, I went all Leo DiCaprio pointing meme as they kept popping up (it’s a sickness). Season 2 of HotD was a brooch bonanza. So to share my trauma with you, here’s my guide to the real-world artefacts they seem to be inspired by. Fair warning – I’m so late in actually writing this that I feel no compunction in sharing spoilers for HotD seasons 1 and 2. 

The Blackwoods and the Brackens 

In HotD season 2, episode three, we are introduced to some new faces who, we quickly gather from context, are members of the feuding houses of Blackwood and Bracken. They wear different colour clothing to help us tell them apart, but, as if to communicate how they are more alike than they are different, the leaders of both parties wear very similar penannular brooches.  

This guy, who the google machine tells me is named Davos Blackwood, wears a silver penannular with elaborate circular terminals, and weirdly, what looks like a bronze pin. I don’t know of any brooches which mix metal components in this way, but silver brooches with disc-shaped terminals are fairly common down to the ninth century. They were particularly popular among the Picts, the real-life ‘kings in the north’ in what would become Scotland. 

Carronbridge, Dumfriesshire penannular brooch, Dumfries Museum

At first glance, it looked like the brooch terminals were perforated, which seemed peculiar, but on closer inspection, it looks like they have empty settings. Well, lots of these brooches in museums also have empty settings, but it’s not on purpose – it’s because they are quite old and the glass, amber or garnet insets have fallen out! 

The Blackwoods’ rivals in this scene are the Brackens, led here by a guy called [checks google] Aeron Bracken, who also wears a penannular brooch. His looks a bit different, though. It appears to be made from a copper-alloy rather than silver, suggesting the Brackens are maybe a rung lower down the social ladder. He wears it slightly differently as well, with the terminals facing in toward his chest rather than straight up. More likely to impale yourself, I might add, which may have historically affected their family’s standing, but I digress. 

Brooch from the St Ninian's Isle, Shetland hoard, National Museums Scotland

Now, this brooch looks rather like some of my absolute favourite Pictish brooches, with confronted animals. Most of these were also made of bronze, but often with an outer layer of gold, silver or even tin to mask their true colour. These were never terribly common, but they were, however, a type that vikings took a shine to, and so from Ireland to Sweden, we start to see lots of pretty awesome takes on penannular brooches with beast heads. 

But for all that, I think the artefacts that the Bracken brooch remind me of most is these ancient Greek ram’s head armlets. They do have examples in the British Museum, too, where we know the inspo came, so for all my digression, this may have been the ultimate inspiration.  

Jace and Baela 

The other most prominent ring-brooches in HotD season 2 are the ones worn by the putative future royal couple, the heirs apparent of Team Black (if they survive the next season), Jacaerys Velaryon and Baela Targaryen. These get a lot of screen time from various angles, so we have a better idea of what these look like (and for the keen-eyed, how they play against different lighting and fabric).  

We have already seen Jace’s brooch, somewhat lost in the black gloom of his northern cloak in episode 1. As the season goes on, we see his outfit and demeanour change from princeling to general, with his brooch becoming ever more prominent, announcing his station almost like a miniature crown.  

Brooch from Høm, Zealand, Copenhagen Nationalmuseet

As Jace’s brooch becomes clearer, we see the hoop is of twisted silver, with what look like dragon-head terminals and a mask at the head of the pin. It’s a mashup of lots of things, but is essentially again a Viking-age take on a penannular brooch. Like the Brackens’ brooch, the hoop ends with confronted heads, but adding a mask at the head of the pin seems to be a Scandinavian Borre-style development. The twisted hoop is drawn from Gotlandic brooches of a similar vintage. All the faceted surfaces allow the light to play across it more dynamically, making it seem to almost move or come alive.  

But then turning to Baela we get a rather different take. She wears a matching padded surcoat to Jace’s but her brooch is clearly different. To start off with, it’s not penannular but annular – a full ring. That means it looks great, but can’t work as a fastener in the same way, as it can’t anchor the cloth with its hoop. This is perhaps why Baela’s is worn with an awesome silver retaining chain, fastened to her belt. 

Tara Brooch, National Museum of Ireland

There are early medieval parallels to the use of a retaining chain. In eighth-century Ireland, there was a fashion for brooches that looked like penannulars, but with such elaborate ornament across the terminals that they were no longer terribly functional without a bit of help; the Tara Brooch is the best example.  

There’s good reasons why Baela’s brooch is different. It expresses continuity with the existing Game of Thrones adaptation's visual language, as her ring brooch with dragons recalls the brooches worn by Danaerys Targaryen and her retinue, Missandei and Grey Worm, towards the end of the series. As arguably the only legitimate heir to the throne between her and cousin Jace, it is fitting to draw a line from Baela to the future queen.  

But all this brings us back to Jace’s brooch which, while functional, actually seems to become less and less practical and more symbolic as the season goes on. Once he acquires his forever outfit of a studded surcoat with fetching red capelet, the brooch worn at the shoulder is no longer actually doing anything. It is pinned onto the cape with its pin pointing down the gap in the terminals, worryingly aimed at his heart. As one Reddit user pointed out, his brooch becomes something rather like the Hand of the King pin (for which, see more below). His brooch, now part of his uniform, is acting like a general’s medals.  

One final interesting point on the brooches of Team Black. By the end of the season, we have recruited a few new team members. At least one of them gains a dragon-brooch, and it is a doozy. It’s an annular dragon similar to Baela’s, but supercharged. New converts are the biggest zealots, and Ulf may be compensating for quite a lot – I guess we’ll find out next season.  

Penannular power: the Hand of the King 

Gathering all of the observations above, then, it seems that Westeros is currently in a historical phase akin to Scotland and Ireland in the Viking Age. Penannular brooches seem to have been widely used, but are now becoming the preserve of regional lords. At the same time, in the halls of power, there are exaggerated versions of penannular brooches being made, but they are less and less functional, and more totemic, retaining the traditional symbolism of power, but worn as medals and badges.  

Hand of the King pin as used in House of the Dragon (source)

There is one last example that convinces me that the use of penannular brooches in HotD is more than just eye candy. It takes a real sickness to even notice this, but there was a subtle change to the design of the iconic pin that the Hand of the King wears in House of the Dragon. In the Game of Thrones series, the pin was a simple hoop and hand, but the subtle redesign for HotD made me do a spit-take.  

Penannular brooch from Ireland, Walters Art Museum

The design is obvious to anyone who has spent too long looking at museum catalogues: the hand is now encircled by the early Irish bronze penannular brooch from the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

If we assume that penannular brooches ‘evolved’ in a similar way in Westeros as they did in Britain and Ireland, the kind of brooch used on the Hand pin would be an antique – the Walters Museum brooch is a classic Kilbride-Jones “group C” of the sixth or seventh century, or some 200-300 years older than the Pictish examples highlighted above.

I love the HotD Hand of the King pin as the apotheosis of the penannular brooch in Westeros. While there still are apparently lots of them out there among the petty kingdoms of the Riverlands, among the halls of power we see that big silver brooches were already on their way to becoming symbolic, keeping their ring shape only as a nod to the antiquity of the brooch as a badge of power. From the annular brooches of Team Black to the antique brooch depicted on the Hand of the King pin, Season 2 of HotD is a great example of how early medieval material culture actually worked, and continues to work on us now, however imperceptibly, more than a thousand years later.

AlmostArch is no longer on Twitter. Follow us instead at AlmostArch.bsky.social.

Featured image by siilverlady

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Is This the Last Dance Before the Lights Go Out?

I hate to say it, because it’s not very solarpunk, but it feels a bit fin de siècle here right now. Like we’re in the last days of normality before we fall off the cliff. Every time we have a nice moment—in the late spring splendor of the garden, for instance, or even just when walking the dog through the fields—we stop, Spouse and I, and tell one another to enjoy it. Because feels like that in the midst of the cataclysms that are about to strike us, we’re going to look back at these little things and wonder how we could have taken them for granted.

And it’s not just us who’s feeling this way. Lately, when we have dinner with friends or chat with our neighbors, at some point, the group converges suddenly upon such thoughts. Be grateful for these moments, we murmur to each other, where we can relax together on our backyard patio, drinking cold white wine, and watch the sunset. Understand that they’re a luxury. Such days are numbered and once they’re gone, not all of us, and maybe not even any of us, will see their likes again.

Who can blame us for seeping in this bittersweet gloom? A perfect storm doesn’t just seem to be looming, it feels like it’s adding elements to itself all the time.

At first it was just the global warming we are still failing to address. But now it’s clear that this global warming is not just bringing deadly heatwaves, droughts, bigger and more frequent storms, sea level rise, and flooding, it’s also threatening to collapse patterns of ocean circulation within the next decade or two such that northern European temperatures will drop to resemble those in Anchorage, Alaska, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and Kamchatka, Russia. On top of all the other disastrous effects this would have—including sudden massive heating of lower latitude areas along the Atlantic—just imagine what would happen if farming were no longer possible in such heavily populated places like Britain, Ireland, northern Germany (where I live now!), Poland, and all of Scandinavia. Food prices soaring all over the world, anyone? Plus widespread famine (and not just in Europe) and the collapse of major economies? If we were young enough to start over again and had the money to move, I’d say we decamp back to my home state of California before climate change turns us into actual refugees. I’m sure I’ll kick myself in five, ten, or fifteen years when saying our garden full of potatoes and the neighbor’s Muscovy ducks and alpacas will be what gets us through the winter here without starving is not just a matter of gallows humor.

Meanwhile, we’re balking at getting the renewable energy revolution going fast enough soon enough to avoid environmental disaster. And why are we balking? Because it’s “too expensive” or because we just don’t want to change anything about the way we live, although these arguments are ridiculous because the cost of doing nothing is astronomically higher and the changes are coming anyway.

We’re also refusing to reverse the widening wealth gap that’s ultimately what’s driving people into voting for the far right, neo–Nazis, and other politicians with authoritarian urges and the desire to destroy democracy… even though these people and political parties will only add fuel to the fires that need to be put out.

Then there is all that misinformation and all the conspiracy theories that seem so perfectly constructed to stop us from working sensibly together to tackle the existential environmental, economic, and social problems that are making it increasingly harder for us to thrive, or often, even to survive.

On top of all that, here in Europe, we have the added issue of the political failures of the post–Cold War period that have had us sleepwalking into a dangerous situation with a resurgently imperialistically hungry Russia. After the Wall came down and the Iron Curtain opened, European politicians thought we could just be friends and trading partners with Russia. Because Russia’s interest in selling us natural gas and crude oil would weave them into our economic world and make them value our markets enough for them never to want to wage war on us ever again. Thus would we lull them into peaceful capitalist prosperity and democracy.

Cozy in that lazy thinking, Europe dropped its guard, domesticating itself rather than its enemy. Its armies grew thin and its stocks of weapons and military machinery thinner. Today, countries like Germany would need the greater part of a decade to build up enough weapons, equipment, and trained manpower to wage even a strictly defensive war. It’s not much different for any other country in Europe. Which is not the position you want to be in when one of your neighbors starts dreaming of their glorious imperialistic past.

To hear politicians and analysts tell it, unless some political miracle convinces Putin to remove crush western democracy from his bucket list, we have three to five years to prepare for war. Such a miracle might be as simple as a heart attack. More likely it involves a sudden splurge in funding to beef up European defenses ASAP plus upcoming elections handing power over neither to the far right in Europe nor to the raging danger that is Donald Trump nor to the Republicans party that has been taken over by people who’ve lost their tether to common sense, compassion, and reality. In other words, yes, we really are talking about a miracle.

I’m no professional, but from my little perch here in Northern Germany, having as long as three to five years feels optimistic. Ukraine is all that is standing between Putin and the massive expansion of his war. If Trump and the Republicans roll into the White House, that’s got to bump up the war is coming to us timeline to... sometime next year or the one thereafter. Seems to me, anyway, because Trump & Co will pull US support out from under Ukraine faster than you can say God damn the electoral college and then she will fall.

Won’t that be the start of the wider war, for the next stops will be Baltic states, like Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Sweden, and Poland, plus neighboring countries like Moldova? Or maybe it won’t even wait that long. Knowing this danger for Estonia, Estonia’s current leader has already more or less said that, in order to save Estonia, they’ll give everything the country has, in terms of funding and military support, to stop Russia from taking Ukraine. And since Estonia is a member of NATO, as soon as they do more than send funding and equipment, doesn’t that drag a huge chunk of Europe straight into the war, even before Ukraine falls entirely to Russian aggression?

Again, I’m no professional on this front, I just live here. But likewise, it’s also hard to see how it will be as long as three to five years before we’re all at war, given how zealously Russia is working to undermine peace, prosperity, and political stability in the West and how feebly we’re counteracting this. Russia takes a mile for every inch we give them, spreading misinformation, causing destabilizing political problems, and committing not even terribly covert acts of sabotage. This sowing of dissent aims to weaken western countries and coalitions ahead of the overt war Russia plans to wage on us. We totally know this! But our politicians are too frightened to retaliate against this hybrid war against us , lest it trigger a real war between us. You can all but hear Putin laughing into our timid faces. Real war is coming anyway!

All of that (plus a bunch of other equally dismal stuff that I haven’t had room to mention) is why living in Europe right now feels like the last dance before the lights go out.

Is it any wonder my thoughts have also recently frequently turned to how such a war would unfold?

Will tanks speed down the little lane we live on? (Honestly, actually, I’ve seen that already, because I think back in summer of 2022, they were training Ukrainian soldiers to drive Marder armored vehicles around here. There was a week when every time I looked out the window, one was zipping by… and let me tell you, it’s amazing how fast these things can race by.)

Will bombs flatten our house?

What can I do to prepare for what is coming? I live in Germany, a couple of hours from the Polish border. So, there is somewhat of a buffer there, but not a huge one. It isn’t inconceivable that there might be fighting here, or that we’d be the target of drones.

I don’t mean to be self–centered about this. There’s a whole lot of destruction and carnage that has to happen to other people and other countries before battles happen here. But it’s not right to just shrug this looming war off by thinking oh, well, it won’t happen here.

I feel like, at my age, I’d make a terrible solider. Never mind that I’ve never been great at blindly following orders, I’m small, middle aged, out of shape, and full of asthma and allergies and chronic injuries, the battle scars from too much fun and soccer playing in my twenties, too much swilling of diet soda, and too much stress in my career. Yet, wouldn’t it make more sense for me to go and fight than it would for someone in their late teens or twenties (or even thirties), who has so much more of life in front of them? Spouse says, well, it would be our jobs to do all the jobs that wouldn’t be getting done if a good chunk of the young men were off fighting. We’d be farming, or helping out in hospitals, or riding around in garbage trucks. I don’t know if that would really feel like doing enough. Part of me thinks he’d be among the first to sign up if Germany gets invaded, even the current work that he’s doing would be critical to maintaining Germany’s renewable energy infrastructure.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how we live about 100 miles from the nearest city that would likely be hit by nuclear weapons, should things get that bad. I think that means we’d be the ones to die of radiation sickness, unless we could stay in a fallout shelter for the couple of weeks it takes the most acutely dangerous radionuclides to decay away. But, of course, like everyone else here, we haven’t got one in our backyard. We don’t even have a cellar. And I don’t want to die in an old abandoned local potato cellar or in one of the dank cubbyholes that passes for a cellar under some of the neighboring houses.

So, I haven’t just started thinking, whelp, even though I finally let us work down the supplies of toilet paper and canned goods I began hoarding in February 2020, it’s time to build up the collection again. I’ve started wondering how I could maybe turn our downstairs guest bedroom into a fallout shelter. It’s already got brick walls and a concrete ceiling. They’re not thick enough, but it’s a good start. What if I bricked up the window and then lined all the walls with another layer of bricks? Would that do, so long as I solved the issue of the flimsy wooden door? Also, could we rejig our solar panels to use them as an island, isolated from the grid, so that we’d have lights and could run a pump a few hours a day to bring air in through a Hepa filter? We could pee into buckets and poop into ziploc baggies, but how would we deal with the dog? With paper, pens, pencils, and maybe even our laptops, and maybe even something as decadent as an exercise bike, at least we wouldn’t die of boredom. Oh… a radio! And batteries. I’d better add that to my mental list.

Then, the dilemma. We have our anniversary coming up. Should I buy him a Geiger counter? Or would it be better to wait until Christmas? Or his birthday early next year? Or can I put it off even longer than that? I don’t want to buy one if I don’t need to buy one, but I don’t want to wait until it’s too late and be unable to get one and then die because we left the fallout shelter too soon, or didn’t realize we had a leak that was letting in dusty radioactive fallout.

But, honestly, argh! I have never in my life been afraid of the future. I even made it through the entire 1980s without having more than the occasional flicker of anxiety about dying in a nuclear war. But now thoughts like these are tying my stomach in knots and keeping me awake deep into the night.

As much as I love solarpunk, and as much as I believe in solarpunk’s vision of a great future that doesn’t require that we go through an apocalypse first, it’s hard to be optimistic about that right now. I cannot shake this feeling that our systems have been so broken and the changes we need to make to the way we do everything are so great that the only way forward is for it all to fall apart. It is hard to shake the feeling that we truly are about to go over that cliff.

That doesn’t mean I won’t stop fighting for the changes we need to make to avoid catastrophe on our way to a sustainable future. But I’m still stuck with the melancholy of these very possibly being the last nice days I will see for either a while or the entire rest of my life.

[mugiwara-lucy]

Fucking sad.

As Tabitha in the video says, the sociopath Stephen Miller is planning on getting rid of the immigrants from either Black, Mexican or Asian Countries per Miller’s own comments in the video.

Notice how the Anti-Immigration crowd have NOTHING to say about immigrants from Scandinavia, Canada, Australia, Ukraine or Russia? I wonder if it’s the lack of melanin? Sounds about white.

We could have had simple immigration reform that both President Biden and Vice President Harris tried pulling for but was rejected thanks to the Bible thumpers. OR people could have gotten over Kamala’s “cackle” and we wouldn’t have so many people now with buyer’s return. I can’t even laugh at this because not only will the “biggest mass deportation ever!” have NEGATIVE ramifications on not just our economy but in society as a whole. Think about the FEAR this will cause because Trump said he will allow ICE to raid schools, churches and hospitals. Couple that with RFK Jr saying he’s going to declare a National Emergency to get fluoride out of water as well as getting chemicals out of food, this administration will be the MOST destructive in America history.

Like….this puts all NON WHITE PEOPLE AT RISK!! And when you remember Trump says he wants to give police federal immunity as well as wanting to implement a nationwide stop and frisk mandate, police brutality and racial profiling as a result of all this will be at an ALL TIME HIGH.

To my non white followers stay safe please.