June Pieces Of My Mind #3

Male stag beetle, Vårdnäs
  • Remember those rappers whose sexual orientation was so fragile that they avoided touching their own donglers? Because touching one was gay? 😄
  • Sure, the WWW gave marginalised groups a voice. Such as Nazi skinheads. And they currently poll at 19% for the Swedish parliament. So no, I don’t think it’s great that the conventional media gatekeepers of the last century can now be bypassed.
  • The relationship between crop prices and agricultural wages have long since changed drastically in such a way that it’s really hard to keep a manor house in good shape on the income of its farmland. One common and successful way in Sweden is to make a golf course of the land and a club house of the manor. Here at Västerby in Vårdnäs, they have also added upscale hotel housing ranges and a tennis court.
  • I’m reading Robert MacFarlane’s Underland. It’s an odd fit of writer to reader temperament. Because RMF writes beautifully, lyrically, sententiously, but seems to have very little humour or cynical distance to his style and subject. No apparent inkling that earnestness can be ridiculous to some readers. But it’s an enjoyable read!
  • The great war ship Mars sank after less than a year’s use in 1564 thanks to a lucky Danish hit with an incendiary that landed in a powder keg. The ship was known colloquially as Jutehataren, “Hater of Jutes”.
  • A roe deer stag is barking hoarsely here. He sounds much bigger and scarier than he is, the slender little thing.
  • OK, so I’m not going to get majority support for my initiative to ban all media reporting about spectator sports. Fine. But how about if we ban all reporting about sports performed by men?
  • After many years in underground larval form, adult male stag beetles live only a couple of weeks as they wrestle other males and attempt to mate with females. The one we found didn’t move except to flail feebly with his legs when gently nudged. Ants were swarming over him. I guess he was completely shagged out.
  • Kinda kanal is sorta this… canal.
  • My wife took a three-day course where everyone embroidered family photographs onto heirloom textiles. She’s been working on her piece for two years and now there’s an exhibition. ❤️
  • You should try marrying someone who tells you after 27 years together, “I’m really lucky to have you”. Highly recommended! ❤️
  • It’s a consolation to me that humans will never wipe out multicellular life. And that after each mass extinction, life radiates, re-speciates, re-diversifies. Only three species of bird survived the impact that killed all other dinosaurs. Today, 66 million years later, there are over 11,000. And there were a lot more until recently, before modern humans expanded across the planet.
  • I think the English language should get its act together and decide what the fuck “TO COMPRISE” means. My library can’t logically both comprise books and be comprised of books.
  • The alternative vegetable farmer we visited today kept chickens as well. She had traded some of her legacy breed birds for broiler chickens as an experiment. Never again, she said. They had no useful instinctual behaviours left after all that focused breeding. Didn’t understand that fresh cabbage might be edible. Kept pecking at the feed device instead. Evolutionary dead end the minute people quit raising them.
  • We have created a high-tech society that would only be sustainable for another 200 years if most people were considerably smarter than the actual median and had a degree in environmental engineering. In other words, we have made a society that we are overall too stupid and ignorant to make work long-term.
  • Dance. Never learn to march!
  • I’m running for local office in September. I’m way way down the ticket and won’t get elected. But I just got email advising me on how to clean up my social media to avoid attacks from political opponents. The main instruction is “Check through your posts starting with the first one”. That’s many many posts a day. Starting 31 years ago if UseNet groups count. Or 38 years ago if FidoNet bulletin board systems count. Nope. 😄
  • Rimforsa, Kisa, Boxholm: these tiny towns in the backwoods wouldn’t have anywhere to have lunch if it weren’t for immigrant small business owners. I heard an ethnic Swede talk shit about foreigners while having dinner at the immigrant pizza place just the other night. 🙄
  • Sudden insight: I’ve spent less than a year of my life working for profit-motivated companies. Whatever my contribution to society has been, it has not been profitable. 😄
  • Improve a book or movie title by swapping woman/women with Wotan/Woden. Pretty Wotan. Scent of a Wotan. Woden on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Woden Who Run With The Wolves.
  • Found some of my own writing and my old deceased friend Lars-Erik Åström’s 1986 book about caving at Kisa Municipal Library.
  • The local boar is tasty here at Kisa Värdshus.
  • The Swedish Fascist Party has published an interactive online map of Sweden’s mosques. This calls for a similar map of the party’s regional and local offices.
  • I hereby nominate Borgarberget in Kisa as Sweden’s Least Impressive Hillfort. Sure, the vegetation means that June is a difficult time to see earthworks. But I’m a trained professional with over 30 years’ experience, and I couldn’t find the rampart. It’s just a fucking hill with three steep sides! 😡
  • I miss the Hartwell & Cramer Year’s Best SF
  • anthologies. They were on the techie “hard” side of the genre without going too far. The eighteenth and last one came out 13 years ago now. I’d be happy to buy something similar in 2026.
  • I once read something astonishing about the Perstorp Ltd. chemical industries that has stayed with me. For many decades, this business didn’t make any profit worth mentioning. It didn’t lose money either. But it wasn’t publicly traded, and the owners made no demands for better profitability. So for at least two generations, all this organisation did was make quality chemical products and provide jobs. Many would say that it was a spectacularly unsuccessful company.
  • Idea for an outing: cycle from one end to the other along Sweden’s tiny, pre-1600, vitally important stretch of North Sea coast at the mouth of River Göta.
  • Learning a lot from Cory Doctorow’s new book Reverse-Centaur’s Guide. Clear, eye-opening reasoning on important present issues. Did you know that the AI companies’ outlandish claims are marketing directed to venture capital firms? Not to you or your boss.
  • Visited a used-book store today, bought an F.G. Bengtsson essay collection, talked to the owner, learned something interesting. Before putting a book on the main Swedish sales site, Bokbörsen, she checks if there are already many copies listed there and at low prices. Then she doesn’t bother. Smart.
  • Today I learned why there’s a 1908 cemetery without any church next to the E4 motorway in Salem. It’s because when Lake Bornsjön became Stockholm’s backup source of drinking water, they would no longer allow inhumation burial at Salem Church on the lakeshore, for fear of corpse contamination. The motorway came much later.
  • Rolsta is the abraded stub of Hrodhvaldastadhir, “Roald’s place”.
  • Boomers are dying off. In the past three months, it’s been three parents of my friends plus my dad’s best buddy. Current life expectancy is 85½ for Swedish women, 82½ for men. In late 2026, women born in early 1941 and men born in early 1944 will pass this milestone.
  • Looking through my calendar I realise, hey, this year I’ll be lucky to catch eight movies at the Stockholm Film Festival. Because I’ll be working 9-5 as a collections curator at a museum storage facility in Hallstahammar!
  • Splurged on hiking gear: bought a silk-sheet sleeping bag for hiking between mountain cabins. My youngest and I are hiking Tänndalen – Grövelsjön in late July.
  • “Red” Mick Hucknall has been releasing albums with various interchangeable musicians for 40 years under the moniker “Simply Red”. In 2008 and 2012, however, working largely with the same band as previously in the 00s, Hucknall released albums under the name “Mick Hucknall”. Huh?!
  • I put a chest strap on my old backpack. Conspicuous consumption!
  • They told us in school in the mid-80s that we were heading towards trouble with the “greenhouse effect”. This turned out to be correct and nobody should act surprised.
  • Historical hamlet plots have not been treated as protected archaeological sites for very long. In 1992 when I started working, it was quite a new thing. It would surprise me if any were excavated before 1980 inside or outside of developer-pays. Early Modern remains were not seen as very informative. And most hamlets are not abandoned: they are working farms, and thus not legally archaeological sites. But under the Early Modern buildings and culture layer there’s often farmsteads from AD 800-1530, the Viking and Middle Ages. I headed evaluation fieldwork on the hamlet plot of Lilla Sylta in Fresta in 2002. There, the Early Modern hamlet sat on the Viking Period cemetery. Not clear where the hamlet had been in AD 1000-1530.
  • I’ve been on metal detector duty for most of the day. Having trouble finding a mode that gives me coins while discriminating nails and horseshoe nails. But part of my problem turned out to be a silly mistake. I couldn’t get a good signal from the current 1 krona copper coin. It was a real conundrum. Until I checked online and discovered that this coin is thinly copper-plated steel. To the detector, it’s just like an iron nail! 😄
  • “Acid Face” by All Them Witches is an 18 minute song intro that never really goes anywhere. It’s good! 😄
  • An important skill and point of experience in a field archaeologist is knowing what you don’t need to document much, what to just machine away. Newbies are usually far too diffident and considerate, very afraid to destroy information irrevocably. Well, that information has to be of use to someone, or collecting it is a waste of your very limited fieldwork time. You can spend weeks just taking the turf layer on top apart, uselessly. We’re like surgeons. Make that incision!
  • Here’s the company I work for on this excavation: Arkeologistik Ltd., performing fine contract fieldwork since 2013.
  • Yay! My third fiction translation is just out! Five of R.L. Stevenson’s novellas, set in Spain, Iceland, the Hebrides, London and Hawaii, and translated into Swedish. Maybe your local library should order it?

June Pieces Of My Mind #2

Boxholm Ironworks Museum
  • Among concert sound technicians, Ulf Lundell’s guitar playing used to be known as “the white noise channel”.
  • It’s a particular summer feeling on a June day with lots of greenery, but overcast and a little drizzle.
  • Mad King Erik, who suffered from paranoid delusion, believed that homeless beggars might be spies.
  • There was a market for garden plants in 1560s Stockholm. The town’s poor house bought them for its kitchen garden. Plants, not seeds.
  • One of the bell ringers in Stockholm’s main church in 1566 was a woman named Margit (= Margaret). Beer tax records suggest that she may have kept a tavern too. Bell ringers needed to be both strong and heavy to counterbalance the bell. No waifs needed apply.
  • All Catholic churches dedicated to Saint Nicholas, such as Old Stockholm’s town church, are homes to the cult of Santa Claus.
  • One reason that it’s so hard to be a conscious consumer is that issues you care about can clash with each other. What’s good for the environment isn’t automatically good for animal ethics. What’s good for the climate isn’t automatically good for the microplastics issue. Having regionally produced ecological produce delivered by van in small quantities to your suburban home is probably really bad for the environment, because it’s wildly inefficient.
  • I’ve just signed a 6-month contract to work as a collections curator for Västmanland County Museum. It’s in Västerås, the country’s sixth largest city. My office will be at the satellite storage facility in nearby Hallstahammar. Västmanland formed part of the core ancient tribal territory of the Swedes that lent their name to the current much larger kingdom, and has rich archaeology.
  • I should emphasise that there is no parallel to be drawn between me and Hank von Helvete, the hard-living lead singer of Turbonegro, who retired from the band to become a rural museum curator. 😁
  • The application that got me this job was number 99 over a period of 20 months. This isn’t quite as depressing or labour-intensive as it sounds. Because many of those applications were as high-school teacher, where you just click-click-send, and where I have no formal qualifications. I applied because I have to submit six applications each month to stay on the dole, and because I’ve taught quite happily at two high schools in recent years. There aren’t six archaeology job listings a month.
  • Rhubarb. Nasty stuff. Just bake an apple pie and everybody will be happier! Rhubarb was originally cultivated for the laxative properties of its root. We should return to this view of the plant, where the leaf stalks are irrelevant. And since we no longer believe in Galenic medicine, we have little need for laxatives. Thus we could just stop growing that thing altogether.
  • Books are a good invention. 👍️
  • I wondered before we went to the concert last Friday if a klezmer band has to say anything about Palestine during their gigs. This one did not. But instead of a merch table, they had a table for a children in war charity. ❤️
  • I would like to see no bailouts at all after this crash please.
  • Eyehategod’s guitarist looks a lot like the elderly Sir Richard Francis Burton in his Trieste days.
  • Capitalism is the economic system with market crashes and extreme economic inequality.
  • I have this unsubstantiated impression that people from poor countries seem to have an unusual number of disabled children. Thinking about this, I remembered, oh, right, prenatal screening. You don’t get that in Burundi or Malawi. The reason that my kids were carried to term is that they were screened and not selectively aborted efter the evaluation. There’s actually a debate about this in Down Syndrome relative associations. There has never been such a low percentage of Downies in the West.
  • Is string theory still being funded and still unable to make any empirically testable predictions?
  • 13 weeks until Sweden votes out the useless Kristersson government. The coalition is already falling apart. The other day they had to withdraw a piece of flagship fascist legislation because four “Liberal” MPs informed party leadership that they wouldn’t obey the party whip if it came to a vote.
  • The Conservatives and the Fascist Small Town Working Men have the weirdest policy for housing production. “We don’t want to build apartment buildings, because polls show that people prefer to own small houses.” Yes, but those polls didn’t ask if people believed that they would ever be able to afford to own a small house. They will not. It’s academic what they would prefer. The Fascists’ core electorate has very little money. It’s all just so stupid.
  • Huge depositions of 1st century BC metalwork from destroyed wagons found near York and next to a top-level British hillfort settlement.
  • Here’s my new media project. I’m going to grow grossly obese and start a YouTube channel where I hand out parodically misogynistic dating advice. I’ll be known as THE MANOSPHERE. It’s a winner, huh?
  • In the process of carrying out the Reformation, King Gustavus I personally stole thousands of farms from the Church under the pretence that they had been donated by ancestors of his. His father’s estate had been 90 farms. Gustavus’s estate ended up at 5,227 farms. This became a problem for his successor, Mad King Erik. He had to share this inheritance with his siblings. So he transferred about 2,500 farms to the Crown and selected noblemen. So Gustavus’s reflexive land amassment didn’t serve its purpose long-term. He didn’t trust that the Crown would be himself and his heirs, so he stole that land from the public sector to control it. But his heir and successor had to hand it back over to the public sector, also in order to control it. The issue wasn’t settled until after the dynasty’s male line died out in 1672. Then the land holdings were all transferred to the Crown.
  • Jethro Tull’s 1987 song “Budapest” is a Dire Straits song with some flute. The loans are many and exact.
  • Today is another Buy Nothing Day. I’m reading a library book for my fiction project and taking notes in a little book my daughter left behind when decamping for tech school. ❤️
  • I am an exceptionally disloyal member of the Swedish Writers’ Union, because I very rarely read any new books in Swedish. This country’s literature scene would collapse in short order if my taste became the mainstream. But where are the Swedish equivalents of Michael Chabon, Mary Roach, Elizabeth Hand, Susanna Clarke, Emily St. John Mandel, Cory Doctorow, Bill Bryson, Jon Ronson, Jonathan Howard?
  • Stark reminder that what RPG rules you use matters a lot to the resulting stories. Hot Springs Island, though system-agnostic, is at heart an old-school D&D module. With those rules, combat is survivable, and players are highly motivated to kill monsters and take their treasure to gain Experience Points. But I’ve run this campaign using a mid-80s version of BRP Magic World. Combat is lethal, there is nothing to gain from killing monsters, and we have stopped counting treasure. With D&D, you get characters who seek out the island’s underground complexes to kill the inhabitants and loot them. With BRP, you get characters who avoid underground complexes entirely unless they’re convinced that there are story-relevant clues to be had there.
  • It’s June 2026 and though I’m a big fan of analytical machine learning, I still see no use case for generative LLM chatbots. This distinction should be front and centre in all discussions of the technology.
  • Because of failing nativity, the municipality has closed the school me and my kids went to. There is no longer a janitor. Bushes are expanding into the paths.
  • The original disco audience is 75 now. Boney M are on the cover of the old-folks magazine Kvällsstunden.
  • One of my dad’s best buddies died last week, aged 84. They used to win yacht races together in Carl-Axel’s little boat when they were in their 40s and 50s. Lidingö runt, Tjörn runt, year after year.
  • Hardly anyone in power right now worldwide is competent or trustworthy. What sets dictatorships apart here is that their citizens are not to blame for who has the power. Unlike for instance Sweden.
  • Sweden has a senseless proliferation of archaeology departments. There’s one for every 1.3 million inhabitants here. In Denmark, that number is 1 per 3.0 million. In Poland, it’s 1 per 4.1 million.
  • In 1566 there were two gunpowder mills at Nacka mill stream. Both burned down in May of that year. The municipality I live in is named for that early industrial site. Because it had a chapel, and the current municipality is a continuation of the chapel congregation.
  • In Lysekil the World Wildlife Fund and the municipal aquarium Havets Hus run a breeding programme for the small-spotted catshark, Scyliorhinus caniculus, Sw. småfläckig rödhaj. And they put on an annual Shark Release event! I was surprised to learn that this fish species is doing great, and that the breeding programme serves the purpose of studying the sharks’ movements. Every fish they release has an ID tag.
  • Fletcher Pratt (1897-1956) seems to be best remembered for his 1948 fantasy novel The Well of the Unicorn. It has by far the most ratings on Goodreads of his books. Sadly though, it doesn’t seem to be very good, scoring only 3.4 out of 5.
  • Does anyone except the Swedish Writers’ Union call machine translation “AI”? Confuses the hell out of me when they say “Our members worry about AI” and they mean Google Translate.
  • The primary sense of the adjective “elite”, according to Merriam-Webster, is this: “of, relating to, serving, or being part of the choice part or the best of a class”. I was surprised when I talked to someone who thought the word meant “rich”.
  • Drove past a store with the surreal word SOFFKONCEPT on the front. Buy a Sofa Concept. Buy it today!
  • Swedish farmers put in grotesquely enormous amounts of labour to clear stones from their marginally fertile fields. The clearance cairns and field walls survive for ever.

Vikings: A Few Things You May Not Know

“Viking” was a job, not an ethnicity. It meant “pirate”. Most Scandinavians at the time were never Vikings, and only the short-livedest, unluckiest young men were Vikings for their whole lives. The aim of most Vikings was to buy a farm and get married.

People have strange heroic ideas about the Viking Period. The reason is that they specifically read heroic literature, much of it written as historical semi-fiction hundreds of years later. It’s like basing your ideas about the 1100s on Walter Scott.

Viking Period archaeology in Scandinavia is deeply unheroic. It concerns itself overwhelmingly with the non-Viking activities of farmers. Most runestones deal with modest land inheritance.

In the 790s, the Scandinavians put sails on their ships and went to raid their first literate area, England. Thus opens the so-called Viking Period, which is an artefact of written history. Archaeology has demonstrated that before that time, the Scandies had been raiding each other at shorter range with rowing ships for at least 1100 years. From Hjortspring c. 340 BC to Salme c. AD 750.

June Pieces Of My Mind #1

1903 steam ship, 1923 city hall
  • One of Stockholm’s main export commodities in the 1500s was seal oil and herring oil, Sw. tran. It was mainly used as lamp fuel, but also to waterproof leather. Mixed with wood tar, the coarsest-grade seal oil was used to impregnate boats and other wooden structures. The finest lamp oil was made through microbial or autolytic rotting in wooden barrels, then skimming off the top. Finally, you boiled the remainder.
  • Walpole’s Otranto again: imagine the horror of seeing your grandfather’s portrait come to life and walk before you into a room behind a door; and later, servants report that they’ve seen a giant leg and foot from a suit of armour in there!!! This is way beyond Clive Barker!
  • I’m going to record an album of really tripped out space rock, with wildly colourful hallucinatory cover art, and it’s going to be titled Your Sense Of Deep Spiritual Insight Is A Neurochemical Artefact.
  • This guy I know informed me calmly that he had run to the pharmacy to buy shaving foam for his wife, or she wouldn’t have been able to shave before putting on make-up. His wife is a cis woman. I’m pretty sure this was Aspie oversharing. But I’m considering the possibility to view it as a conscious radical body-positive break with conventional rules for what men can say about women.
  • Imagine if we could reclaim all the time we’ve spent explaining the difference between memory and disk to Boomers.
  • A stronghold on an island is precarious during a Nordic winter, when the enemy can easily attack across the ice. Another use for seal blubber oil: send people out with axes to cut a moat in the ice around the island, then pour seal oil into the moat. It floats and keeps new ice from forming.
  • The painter John Blanche has died. He was a household name to 1980s gamers. His was a Baroque, somewhat naïvist style, instantly recognisable. I much preferred him to the slick airbrushers who dominated fantasy illustration in that period. Warhammer and WH40k would have looked completely different without him!
  • I told the programming manager at the museum that’s hiring me that I have countless talks prepped on various subjects, and that whenever she has an empty slot she can put me in it at short notice.
  • A little sad and wistful for no reason on this sunny summer evening.
  • Cycling home, I saw a badger! ❤️
  • “It’s not plausible to me that a development path where the first step is a sentence-continuation machine that emits bad Julius Caesar dialogue and the next step is a sentence-continuation machine that emits decent Julius Caesar dialogue is one with a conscious Julius Caesar—or consciousness of any sort—as its end point.” /Ted Chiang
  • Yay! So happy! I contracted a slight tinnitus on my right ear last year, and then my general hearing on the same ear has steadily become worse and worse. But just now I discovered that it was simply a wax plug, “impacted cerumen”! 👂️👂️👂️
  • Friluftsfrämjandet Vaxholm organises full-moon sea kayaking in August. Sounds wonderful!
  • I made an approximate version of Småland cheese cake for my gaming group. It’s basically Yorkshire pudding / ugnspannkaka with cottage cheese and chopped toasted almonds in it. Served it with whipped cream and strawberry jam. At one point three of that evening’s four gen-X players were asleep. 😄
  • Reading about a fascinating case of truth-establishment in maths. Shinichi Mochizuki is a highly respected mathematician. In 2012 he published pre-prints of the “Inter-universal Teichmüller theory”, and in 2021 a definitive version in a journal that he edits. If his claims hold up, it’s a huge deal. Sadly, the work is couched in such novel (or home-made, or odd) language, that mathematicians can barely understand it. And it’s so long that nobody can afford to examine it in depth. 😄
  • This is a special case of a solid old rule of thumb in science: A Single Study Is No Study At All. Scientific knowledge does not exist on the printed page. It only exists in a consensus formed among specialist participants. So if they can’t even understand a contribution and form an opinion about it, then that contribution is not scientific knowledge. Regardless of what’s printed on those many, many pages.
  • There’s a paleobotanist that I know at this rooftop bar.
  • Just realised that I have mistakenly hated Roland Barthes with the heat of a thousand suns. Because I got him mixed up with Jacques Lacan.
  • Here’s a cool supernatural scene in Otranto: we see the back of a cowled figure kneeling at an altar. When it turns around to face the viewpoint character it’s a skeleton in a hermit’s clothes, and delivers some ominous lines. This is better than those ridiculous bits of a huge suit of armour. 👍️I wonder if this is straight from stage plays of the time.
  • The 20th century is receding in the rearview mirror. I bought an e-book of a 1940s fantasy novel put out in 2011 by Gollancz. In the series foreword, the editor writes that “vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print”. Dreams of the future staying firmly in the past, yellowing paperbacks on the used book market.
  • Checked why Le Monde keeps going on about something called “Roland-Garros”. It’s a tennis stadium (boo) named for an aviation pioneer (yay).
  • We’re still in the middle third of the 2020s. The final third starts on 1 September. That’s the late 2020s.
  • Maria Strømme, an Uppsala materials science professor, has published a paper where she claims to have discovered that reality consists of a “universal conscience field”, ergo everything is ensouled. She got the Uppsala University press office to describe this as a paradigm shift in official channels. Her fellow physicists AND the philosophers she hadn’t consulted much immediately called this sheer crankery. And now the paper has been withdrawn. 😄
  • Today’s 14 weeks until Sweden votes out the useless Kristersson government. It can do nothing without the permission of the Fascist Small Town Working Men’s Party. The governmental coalition’s four current parties are projected to get only 44% of the seats, after one of them gets kicked out entirely thanks to the 4% cutoff for entry.
  • Funny how today’s Fascist parties are super racist, when Mussolini wasn’t. Also, it’s a great moment in WW2 when the Germans ask the Japanese to please murder all their Jews, and the Japanese just politely ignore this, because they find the distinction between Christian and Jewish Europeans completely irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong: the Japanese absolutely believed in a Master Race that was way better than everyone else. They just didn’t think it was any kind of European. 😁
  • It took a long time for me to realise how short a life span a novel typically has. When I was a kid in the ’80s, I found it obvious that most 19th century books were never read anymore. But I never thought that the 20th century books I grew up with would go the same way.
  • Our insect hotel and birdbath are in high demand now. ❤️
  • A memory. I’m 18, alone in Jerusalem for one night before I’ll ride a bus to excavations on a ruin mound in the Galilee. I’m staying at the Lutheran Hospice near the Jaffa Gate, a little lonely, a little nervous. In the common room, I find a badly beat up paperback copy of Pratchett’s Colour of Magic. ❤️
  • The LLM craze is one of the most absurd events in the history of computing. There have been other failed products. But not on this crazy scale. And mostly, it hasn’t been difficult for the IT industry to argue that their new products are actually better than the ones from five years ago. Now they’re flailing to get us to buy and use a technology that is obviously worse than the old one, which is still available from other brands. I’m typing this on a linux machine where I work in LibreOffice.
  • Someone I care about has turned 83 and thus beaten current Swedish life expectancy for men despite several strokes! ❤️
  • The deer leave the iris alone. But the fuckers have absolutely destroyed the tulips and the orpine. I’ll have to move those inside the fence. Also they keep nipping the new shoots from the rosebushes. Good thing the deer have at least tasked one of their number to pose fetchingly outside our kitchen window now and then, as compensation.
  • Technocracy has nothing to do with technology or tech bros. It’s a much older word and means government by trained specialists. Obama was known for his technocratic leanings. This referred to his penchant for hiring PhDs with long experience.
  • In Scandinavia, AD 536 to 1000 is the Long Vendel Period , followed by the Middle Ages. The latter period starts with the Ringerike Style. There is no Viking Period. Fight me.
  • The collar of the white shirt I wore on two steam ships Saturday is black inside from the coal smoke.
  • Please help me find that lovely drawing of Lovecraft having an anxiety attack while lurching down a New York street edged with tenements and full of scary foreigners!
  • About Mormons and Christianity. Joseph Smith wrote Old Testament fanfic, right? Isn’t Mormonism more like a 19th century fork of Judaism? To anyone who thinks I’m being disrespectful to Joseph Smith here, let me hasten to say that I believe that every single creator of a religion throughout history was on the same level as Smith. The older ones are just not as well documented. Smith was truly another Deuteronomist, Jahwist, Jesus, Mohammed.
  • Not to mention Paul. Did you know that there was a period of half a century after the death of Jesus when the only source of written information about how to practise Christianity was whatever Epistles you could find a copy of? No Gospels, only collections of Jesus quotations that haven’t survived. The Epistles are the D&D 1.0 rule set of that religion.
  • Here’s a thought for Game Masters. Is the dungeon too complicated for anyone in it to realistically have any overview of how the various rooms interrelate in XYZ coordinates, or in what direction the various passages run? Then you, the GM, don’t need a map of the dungeon either. It’s Colossal Cave again: a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. You just need an abstract flowchart that documents for instance that room 2 is between rooms 1 and 3.
  • It’s just ridiculous how poorly I am from this damn virus. Still, it’s a lovely day, I’m still on the dole, no duties. I’ll just vegetate here, coughing and sniffling.
  • Kåkbrinken Street leads from Main Square in Stockholm’s Old Town to the Lake Mälaren shoreline. In 1564 there were still vacant plots along Kåkbrinken. There may have been wooden structures on this land in the preceding 300 years, and much of it was recently reclaimed land, but there were still plots with no masonry buildings. Stockholm was a tiny humble place.
  • Another fragment surfaces from deep memory storage: there were rumours about a masturbating monkey game for the Commodore 64, named “Piccolo Mouso”. I checked just now, and yes, it’s a simple game from 1983 where your task is to help a cartoonish monkey masturbate. Use this information in any way you see fit.
  • Autumn 1561. Stockholm’s Crown gunpowder storage is inventoried. Four sacks are missing. The explanation given is that they were destroyed on 21 August when Otto the Bombmaker “burned up”.
  • Love Leaf Hound
  • There was an established social mechanism in 1500s Stockholm for how to keep a master craft workshop running without pause even though the master died. The widow would run the business with existing staff, gear, premises, customers, until she re-married with another man in the same trade. When you married such a master’s widow, you even took on any debt the business might have. No limited liability companies yet. A similar result was had when the daughter of a master craftsman married someone in the same trade while her father still lived.
  • A corporation named Lyten has bought the failed car battery plant in Skellefteå. Probably to make it a data center. There’s green hydropower. Lyten is an old Swedish word. It means “physical defects”. 😄
  • Remember Ulf Something, the soon-to-be former chairman of the Swedish Conservatives? What a guy! Short fellow. Always a big smile. Didn’t quite understand the concept of political corruption. Come on, of course you remember Ulf!
  • What’s the rule of thumb again, if I have Covid: should I or should I not attend a multi-day Tantric Sex camp in Molkom? It’s so confusing. Is “super-spreader event” super or not super?

Thoughts After Seventeen Sessions of the Coriolis RPG

Coriolis is the most successful Swedish space opera role-playing game. The first edition appeared in 2008 (Swedish only), the second and most productive so far in 2016 (Swedish and English), and the third in 2025 (English only). What sets this game apart from standard space opera is the rich and opulent Near East set dressing. (Though not as much in the 3rd ed.) Kirk wears a turban, Spock wears a fez and Uhura wears a silk hijab. It’s Star Trek meeting the Arabian Nights at the best kebab restaurant in the galaxy.

From January to June, my RPG group has played 17 sessions of Coriolis 2016, with median four players plus game master. I chose this game because I wanted space opera, I wanted a lot of published scenarios to pick from, and I did not want any connection to a TV series, movie franchise or book series. (To avoid lore overload.) There are extremely few options that cover all these three parameters. Yet even Coriolis 2016 has only ten published scenarios.

At seventeen sessions, this was the third longest campaign our group has played in a bit less than six years. We obviously enjoyed it quite a lot. I liked four out of ten published scenarios well enough to run them, and after that we continued on with material I came up with myself using the game’s rich world description, callbacks to previous sessions and some random tables in a supplement.

Having played a lot of Mutant Year Zero and Vaesen, we found the core rules familiar. The Free League dice-pool system works well, though Coriolis has one unfortunate detail that few gamers seem to like much. When you push a roll or use one of your character’s talents, the GM gets a “Darkness Point”, which he can use to mess with the players. He is explicitly allowed to pronounce someone suddenly insane, cause the ceiling to cave in, steal their stuff or have the players’ space ship malfunction.

One problem with this is that in most RPGs, a GM is allowed to do these things at will, even encouraged to do so when it serves the story. So the points tend to just stack up unused. Another problem is that if Izzaldina is the one who keeps pushing skill rolls and giving the GM Darkness Points, nothing keeps him from using them to repeatedly drive Ubaid insane instead, perhaps five weeks later. A third problem is that published scenarios make it quite clear that the GM is free to give himself a bunch of extra Darkness Points at the start of each act in a scenario. So a GM effectively has unlimited Darkness Points, that he may not have much use for. So why not push every roll? It probably won’t make the ceiling collapse more often anyway.

It would have been impossible to get all my players to read up on hundreds of pages of intricate world-building before we started playing. Instead I identified the four most important terms and made a handout for the players to read out loud and refer to. After a few sessions that opened with this, they knew the basics and picked up additional lore as they moved forward.

Our campaign followed the crew of the trader Nebukadnessar as they sailed around the Dabaran Circle moving goods and discreetly solving problems for their patron, a powerful senator. We never pay attention to money, but the captain was quite happy anyway to know what goods were cheap and marketable and figure out where to take them. Having run four published scenarios,* I threw a series of far less well-prepped balls to the players, prominently including:

  • Deliver a possibly dangerous space-battle AI to an anti-piracy flotilla
  • Convince an indigenous queen to stop aiding the pirates
  • Assassinate their patron’s political opponent (though they figured out that this task was a setup by a double agent)
  • Escape the law after two players tried to assassinate their own main opponent
  • Investigate rumours about a rebel training camp
  • Give a series of problematic passengers rides through a war-torn system
  • Figure out who the teenager found adrift in an escape pod is (the son of the pirate leader)

* Vilddjurets öga, Ikonernas algebra, Arams hemlighet, Det döende skeppet

May Pieces Of My Mind #3

Opening ceremony of the Stockholm Tolkien Society’s anniversary
  • During the election season, the media have been full of extremely pretty teenage girls speaking perfect Swedish who have tearfully told the nation on primetime TV that because of the fascist small-town working men’s Draconian citizenship legislation pushed through by the government, they are facing expulsion to failed states where they have no surviving family. 🙄
  • Accountancy sources document waggoners delivering large amounts of sand to the churchyards of the Franciscans’, St. Nick’s and St. Claire’s churchyards in Stockholm in the 1560s. It was in order to prepare the ground for another layer of burials during a plague epidemic. This might be correlated with the stratigraphy on these sites.
  • Mood: happy because a) I met with such appreciation for my talk and guided tour yesterday, b) Someone says they may want to hire me, c) It’s such a beautiful time of year, d) I have a lot of fun things planned for the coming months
  • Greek cowgirl gun desperado in the Wild West: Kalamata Jane
  • Trade was still largely conducted in goods in 1500s Sweden. If you sold commodities to the Crown, you were often paid in iron or butter. When Mad King Erik succeeded his father Gustavus, there were 488 metric tonnes of butter in the Crown storehouse in Stockholm.
  • I think people with conspiracy theories should involve themselves more in them. Not just “[Ethnic group] controls finance and government”. Instead “I can’t say too much about this, but you should know that I’m involved with a shady cabal that controls finance and government”.
  • I’ve placed the data for my stone axes study in two online repositories: [1] [2].
  • My friend’s familiar in Ars Magica is a 2.5 meter owl from the land of the giants. He has created a spell just to be able to shrink the owl and avoid scaring people in towns.
  • Most of today’s Swedish care assistants were born outside the EU.
  • The first mason bees of the summer have arrived in our bee hotel. ❤️
  • Pondering a technical writing problem. As Doyle teaches us, it’s extremely useful to have a named, personalised, slightly daft narrator in fiction, rather than an omniscient one. Particularly for comedy. But Doyle was writing about contemporary London for his contemporaries. I’m writing about Renaissance Stockholm for current readers. So I need to describe and explain the setting — but my narrator has no reason to do so. I’m trying to get by with brief implied description.
  • 1/6 men at this Left Party prep event.
  • I need to check that I’ve got a black tie for Wednesday’s funeral service for my late aunt’s late ex. I used to see them all the time in like 1978-1984. It’s strange to think that they are no longer a) married, b) alive. Historical figures.
  • Since three years ago, CD Baby no longer sells any CDs.
  • Old maths guy gave me a really good reply when I asked him to join us on the Thursday dishwasher team. “Yes, I’ll help! That’s good, it gives me a reason to attend the anniversary”. He’s coming because there’s an unpaid task where he’s needed. ❤️
  • For the 1561 coronation of Mad King Erik, the Swedish crown imported 696 halberds. These could be used against cavalry on a battlefield. But here they were intended as props for parades and pageantry around the coronation. Erik shot the Crown finances, previously kept in solid order by his father, to smithereens with courtly luxuries, failed marriage proposal expeditions overseas, and wars.
  • In Raymond Briggs’ classic 1977 graphic novel Fungus the Bogeyman, the bogeymen say boibye when they part: “boils be with ye”. I Bengt Sahlbergs svenska översättning blev det bölhej; “bölder vare med dej”.
  • In September of 1576 the Stockholm merchant Morten Gabriel (from Lübeck?) was sentenced to death. According to his own confession, he had counterfeited a passport and a royal letter, presented the documents in Kalmar, and claimed to be on a royal mission to negotiate with fortune-tellers in Småland. Court documents comment that John III, being a Christian king, was highly affronted by the merchant claiming to deal with “witches and devil people” on his behalf.
  • Whatever intelligence is, no scientist or scholar has ever suggested that it’s when you look at enormous amounts of text and use it to calculate what the next word should be.
  • In The Castle of Otranto Ch. 3, Princess Matilda helps young Theodore escape her father’s dungeon and leave the castle. But first, she takes the fugitive to the armoury and gets him into a full suit of plate!? Clank… clank… clank… 😄
  • As my wife and I walked to the bus this morning, local Muslims were gathering in Fisksätra Square for the Feast of Sacrifice. They were in traditional ethnic clothes. And so were we, because we were on our way to a funeral. I was in a dark suit with a black tie, an outfit that I hardly ever wear. Actually, my wife was in foreign traditional clothes. You dress in white for funerals in China, not black.
  • Because of over-hunting, the Common Murre / Guillemot (Uria aalge) was down to 20 nesting pairs on Stora Karlsö Island 130 years ago. Thanks to these birds’ protected status since then and other environmental protection measures, there are currently over 25,000 nesting pairs on the island. ❤️
  • Project Gutenberg published Walpole’s Otranto in October 1996, almost 30 years ago, as their 696th book. The first Gothic novel has so far been available as a free ebook for 11% of its existence.
  • Yay! I just got a museum curator job! Six months to begin with, starting in October. The references given by my Polish friends were apparently unusually positive! More details when the paperwork has gone through.
  • The Tolkien Society’s anniversary uses a venue rented from the Seventh Day Adventists. I wonder what their official stance on conservative Catholic fantasy authors is like.
  • I think I may have levelled up in grandpappery. Not only do I own grandpa slippers. I’ve also forgotten where I put my slippers.
  • The Stockholm Tolkien Society used to parade through central Stockholm in full fantasy larp outfits on Ascension Thursday. On one occasion, a bystander asked, “What are you protesting against?” “Reality.”

May Pieces Of My Mind #2

Danvikstull Bridge
  • Lilacs starting to bloom, weeks earlier than in the 70s.
  • Mad King Eric XIV murdered at least two unarmed civilians: one with a dagger, the other with a wrought-iron poker.
  • Love the geeky grey-bristled audience at stoner rock gigs. There are always some senior original Sabbath fans. ❤️
  • Huh. Someone stole my cheap acrylic beanie cap and my worn-out leather gloves from the handlebar basket of my bike. Got to be someone way poorer than me. Keep them as a gift, buddy.
  • I had an idea. You could probably get through the infamously slow 2:41 hours of Stalker if you treated it as an eight-episode TV series and spread it out over several days.
  • A memory: after some travels a few years ago I was telling someone “It’s really interesting, the Jews are returning to Poland!”, and this woman who overheard what I said gave me this shocked and disgusted look. I don’t think she was an anti-Semite — I got the feeling that she believed that the only kind of person who talks about Jews is a Nazi. I wonder if she would have been equally shocked if I had talked about Sámi, Kurds or Tamils.
  • I keep coming back to the fact that the people who call themselves nationalists and worry about the future of good old national culture are universally the ones with the least cultural capital on the public stage: the small-town working class.
  • I like rock club gigs, not stadium concerts. But man, those bands must barely be making ends meet. Last night I heard three bands from Mexico City, LA and Mönsterås, and I only paid €28! They played Scandinavia’s biggest city, and the venue was tiny and half empty. This was the kind of gig where band members are manning their own merch table, chatting to fans, watching the other bands play. They certainly aren’t in rock music to get rich.
  • Someone should put huge signs at the road into Mönsterås, reading: MONSTER ASS
  • How piquant. In September’s local election, the Conservatives in Nacka are fielding a candidate, 86-y-o Moa Bern, who is also running for a microscopic Neo-Nazi party, “The Fourth Reich Party”. (She’s way down the Conservative list, no danger of her getting in.)
  • In 1567, King Eric was first wildly paranoid and delusional for months, then catatonic. On 6 July he notes in his diary, in a hand barely recognisable as his own, “I had Christopher the Cook beheaded”.
  • Have now made an agreement to work as a field archaeologist for three weeks in July on an historic hamlet plot, Sw. bytomt, in the Stockholm suburb of Märsta. It’s not a 2½ year university contract for full-time research like my last job, but beggars can’t be choosers. I look forward to it!
  • Everyone knows about Rick Astley, how he had a hit with “Never Gonna Give You Up” in 1987 when he was 21 and then kind of disappeared from stardom until the song became a global Internet joke. But did you know that he released a solid soul album in 2023? Listen to the tracks “Dippin’ my feet” and “Never Gonna Stop”.
  • As previously reported, among the candidates for the Swedish elections in September, my party The Left has the largest number of librarians, and the fascists have none. Today we learn that the Left leads in museum, archive and heritage professionals too. But that the fascists actually have close to the median number of candidates from these professions.
  • The Swedish Fascists want to legislate that school lunch rooms have to serve meat every day. Because they are a bunch of morons with an outdated, fragile masculine identity where eating meat and driving a fossil-fuel car is important. Meanwhile, the local Fascists and Conservatives in Kungsbacka have removed chicken hot dogs from the school menu, which means that observant Muslim and Jewish children have to eat the veggie alternative.
  • Five counts of drug offences, one count of drunk driving and two counts of aggravated unauthorised driving. These were the charges brought by the prosecution against Katja Nyberg, a former member of the Sweden Democrats and now an independent MP. She is alleged to have used amphetamine, cocaine and MDMA on four separate occasions. On one of them she was driving a car and caused a traffic accident. Nyberg, a former detective inspector, blames kombucha.
  • I wonder how Thucydides pronounced his own name. All I know is that it was nothing like how Swedes or Brits pronounce it. Those two pronunciations, BTW, are wildly different.
  • Rode the train past Hyndevad, a major sacrificial site in River Eskilstunaån. People sacrificed stone and bronze objects in the rapids here for over 2000 years. Read for free about the site in my 2015 book, In the Landscape and Between Worlds!
  • The musicians that formulated the deathmetal and blackmetal genres are grandfather age now. Of the metal founding generation, Iommi and Butler are 78 and 77, great grandfather age.
  • Our High Society tournament turned out great fun! All ages, genders, many languages. And an excellent junior member of my friend Fred’s household brought home the gold medal! Thank you Alphaspel for your kind sponsorship! You are truly a great Friendly Local Game Store. With a café!
  • An old fellow came to my RPG sesh yesterday with about 1.5 litres of dice, kept in a crocheted old-lady’s hat. ❤️🎲
  • My wife reports that whenever I travel, the house gets really messy. Someone is dropping stuff in random places and nobody’s putting it back where it belongs. ❤️
  • Eye-opening observation on the excellent Common Descent podcast. Predatory dinosaurs on film and in comics always roar a lot, stomp around and kill as many prey items as possible in a short time. But real predators never do this. They hunt silently for efficacy, and once they’ve caught a meal, they quietly settle down to eat it. The roaring and stomping is mostly for mating rivalry displays. So if a dino does that, he just thinks you’re trying to take his girlfriend.
  • The beer, wine and whiskey hobbies are equivalent to the stoner subculture. Do you read Craft Beer and Brewing, Wine Enthusiast or Whisky Magazine? They are just like High Times. Fight me.
  • It’s such a comfort to visit a museum dedicated to interculturally receptive art in an era when ignorant near-sighted fascist Philistines are so loud in the public forum. It really soothes my suburban professional-class soul.
  • My youngest and I are good at companionable silence. She told her mom the other day that mountain hiking with Dad is super restful because we don’t have a lot to talk about, so you just kind of zone out and become one with the landscape. ❤️
  • Biblical creationism is such a weird part of Christian Scripture to obsess over. It should be theologically and liturgically unimportant whether the disparate creation narratives are factually correct or not. Let’s first make sure you follow the Sermon on the Mount exactly in your lifeways. Then maybe eventually we can get round to issues of deep geological chronology.
  • Quite a lot of Finnish and Slavic immigrant men serve as elected representatives of the Swedish Fascist Party. This may seem a little odd since the party is virulently xenophobic. But paradoxically, it shows that these men are quite well integrated. Because Fascism is the biggest political affiliation among old-stock-Swedish small-town working men. In running for office for the Fasc, Mściwoj Swigon behaves like a normal Swedish working man.
  • Sometimes flame wars break out on Wikipedia’s discussion pages that illustrate starkly how fine the line is between just the right amount of autism and too much autism when contributing to the encyclopedia.
  • Hey Polish-speakers, please take part in my small victory. I speak only very rudimentary Polish. But for five years, I listened to a monthly podcast in that language, in the hope to familiarise myself with it. Now get this: a news website mentioned an unfamiliar Polish name and spelled it “Msciwoj”. And I could tell right away that this didn’t sound right. Yep, it’s Mściwoj.
  • Ran into my older daughter on the bus, held her makeup case while we had a good chat. ❤️
  • Aaaw, look what one of the RPG players at LinCon last week wrote about my sesh on a forum: “If you get the chance to play with Mrund, you should grab it, because it’s bursting with energy.”
  • You know over-night oats? I just invented over-night pasta. Put dried pasta in boiling water in the evening, then eat it cold for lunch the following day. You should try it! I wonder what it’s like.
  • Isn’t there a magical shield inside a giant toad in Village of Hommlet? Man, early D&D scenarios are ridiculous.
  • Many women who lived in 1560s Stockholm were married three times because husbands 1 and 2 died.
  • Trying to determine when I got into stoner rock. It seems to have been in 1999 or 2000. The first two songs I remember liking that were referred to with that genre label were “Silverball” by Dozer and “Feel-Good Hit of the Summer” by QotSA. This wasn’t the music of my early youth. I was 27, a dad and a PhD student.
  • A memory. My dad didn’t want to play Trivial Pursuit, because he didn’t want to waste his time doing anything trivial. We didn’t know what “trivia” means, and so didn’t get the pun.
  • Phew, a four-hour gig including a talk and on-site guiding at four locations. Good audience, very interested, and they did not run away though given ample opportunity.

LinCon 2026 Gaming Convention

Manhattan (1994)

I had a fun and busy LinCon 42, my twelfth time at Linköping’s big annual gaming convention. Game-mastered two RPG sessions on Hot Springs Island och co-organised a tournament in the card game High Society. Played some shorter boardgames: Manhattan, High Society, Samurai, Castle Combo. Looked at used games, sat through half of the auction. Met loads of old acquaintances, stayed with dear friends who used to be in my gaming group before moving to Linköping.

Had an unfamiliar problem though with my second RPG sesh. Only one of four signed-up players came. He was a talkative and fun guy, and we could have played just the two of us. But I had an idea – there were six or seven players plus the GM playing another RPG in the room next door. So I asked if anyone wanted to jump ship. And a friendly fellow whom I’ve played with before came over, and all was well. There was a return player in my first sesh too this year, which made me happy and proud.

Here are my impressions of LinCon 2025.

May Pieces Of My Mind #1

  • I made friends today with Anton & Maria’s 15-month son Marc. We played with a plastic bottle, then he sat on my lap and demanded to be fed soup, and he conversed with me in a language of his own devising. Endlessly lovely little fellow. ❤️
  • The Fascist-controlled Swedish government has made it possible to jail 13-y-os for serious crimes. But the actual kids that get recruited by gangs for e.g. murders are very often intellectually disabled and have no understanding of the consequences. The same considerable resources could be used more effectively to educate and monitor kids who aren’t clever enough to say no.
  • It would be less confusing, more consistent, if I was unemployed and people thought my talks and my research were boring. 🤔
  • How do you point at the train car you’re in: this car? I pointed at the floor. The young man who was looking for his seat thought I meant that there was a basement.
  • Three writers currently have their own labelled shelves in the Stockholm Old Town branch of the Scifi bookshop: H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien and B. Sanderson.
  • So there’s a wave of LLM-tainted fiction coming? Well good luck with that, publishers. When I checked recently, the median age of the books I had read in the previous 12 months was 22 years. Median publication year 2002. I’m currently reading a physical book from 1955. I’m certainly not going to start to buy more new fiction if you adulterate your offerings.
  • Woah. I had a couple of gigs once where I taught Internet culture to advertising students. I blew their minds by showing them an ad blocker under Windows, something they were quite unaware of because they all used Macs. Now get this. It’s 20 years ago now. They are all over 40. I’ve been on the net for 31 years.
  • Playing Coriolis 2016. Where on the planet of Dabaran is Urzid the Installation Pasha? As it turned out, he was sitting drugged and zip-tied in the disabled person’s staff toilet at the seediest casino in Cloud Town.
  • When I think about how my youth is gone and most of my middle age as well, I console myself with thinking that I lost none of that time to brainless jobs, drunkenness or jail.
  • New recruitment method: employer invites me to watch five short video clips of a lady posing questions, then respond with clips of myself answering them. OK, why not, worked well technically at least.
  • I started spending a lot of time in Fisksätra in ’87 and now I’ve lived here for 30 years at four addresses. I just realised — I’ve lived here for most of the housing development’s lifetime. It was only 15 years old when I started coming here, and now it’s 54.
  • There was this colleague of mine, eleven years older than me, who was fairly well known in the 90s and 00s. I heard he became director of contract archaeology at a county museum. After citing a book of his just now, I checked what he’s been up to lately. Not one published piece of writing since 2006. Twenty years of silence. By now he’s got less than 1/10th of my number of publications. And he’s retirement age.
  • DeepL thinks that a better translation than “The Authors’ Photocopying Fund” would be “The Authors’ Reproduction Fund”. I’ve always done that in an unpaid pro bono capacity.
  • I’m corresponding with one “Isabella Rodriguez” who sent me an LLM-generated scam offer to translate an academic paper about political economy for “Bisnow Real Estate Organization”. 😄
  • Movie: The Lost World (1925). An adventurous expedition to a plateau in the Amazon where stop-motion dinosaurs live, with a love triangle and some comic relief. Grade: good!
  • Yay! Friendly local game store Alphaspel is sponsoring our High Society tournament at LinCon with three copies of the game!
  • Submitted my 68th academic journal paper / book chapter. It’s titled “Shouldered shafthole stone axes of the Late Bronze Age in south-east Sweden”. Natural scientists are not at all impressed by a late-career researcher with 68 papers. But that’s because they work and write in lab teams. If a typical nat-sci paper has five co-authors, then my work represents 340 papers. In addition to my seven monographs.
  • I represent Cynical Anthropology, a movement that aims to place traditional small-scale societies on a level with modern technological ones. Specifically, we aim to despise and deplore all societies equally, and to ridicule people’s beliefs regardless of whether they are indigenous or colonialist.
  • My wife and I disagree about duvet covers. I believe that you should always use the pair that has been in the cupboard the longest. My wife believes that you should always use the available pair that you find most pleasing, until it falls apart. Only then move on to less pleasing duvet covers.
  • The Libertarian Farmers’ party has the median number of librarians on their tickets for September’s general elections in Sweden (all three levels of government). They’ve got nine. My party, the Left, has 37. The Fascists have none.
  • A thing I really pride myself upon is a set of strong innate executive functions. Yesterday I submitted my stone axes paper. Today I went to the library and borrowed some books to mine for my Gonzo Renaissance Stockholm fiction project.
  • My wife chuckled at me for shuffling around at 10:30 in the morning in my dressing gown. “You’re such a typical jobless guy”, she told me affectionately. I replied that she’d misunderstood the situation completely. “Baby, this dressing gown signals that our house is the Playboy Mansion, and I’m Hugh Hefner.”
  • Found a bizarre method of endnote numbering in a 1994 book published in Stockholm. All footnotes are numbered 1-9 in a repeating series. 1-9, 1-9, 1-9. This ignores the chapter division. The first note in a chapter can have any number 1-9. At the end of the book, the notes are organised under page-number headings. To find note 3 for page 123, go to heading 123, then read note 3.
  • I don’t really get men’s hatred of women. But then I’ve been in loving relationships with women almost constantly since I was 15. I’ve just been monstrously spoiled, really. No grievances.
  • Re-reading bits of Lem’s novel, I’m reminded that Solaris is not actually set on a space station. It’s a near-surface hovering structure that uses anti-grav tech, like an oil rig without the legs. There’s gravity and the crew rides helicopters.
  • Stanisław Lem’s preoccupation with incomprehensible aliens is just boring in Eden (1959). Most of the aliens there are mentally handicapped after large-scale inept genetic engineering. When finally the humans find a smart alien he makes perfect sense. But before that you have to read over 200 pp of pointless gibberish. It gets much better in Solaris (1961). The worldwide ocean-like gelatinous creature interacts with humans like a curious unsmiling baby: wordless, playful, inscrutable.
  • I don’t watch YouTube much, and I’ve drastically shrunk my usage of the parent company Google’s services. Maybe this has confused the advertising algorithm. Just now I was watching a how-to-play video about the boardgame Arcs, and YouTube showed me an ad for a hair-related product. You know, middle-aged men can feel insecure about their hair. Makes sense, this is well known. But I got an ad for hair removal?
  • As it turns out, my old buddies really like Krupnik, Polish pistachio Bailey’s.
  • Today’s the start of the shorts and sandals season! I’ll bring a pair of socks for my crepuscular bike ride home. When you’re grandpa age you get to wear socks in sandals, and everyone will just greet you with silent awe + respect.
  • I just had a nibble from an employer for a short fieldwork gig. Hell yeah, said I! Like a recent BA graduate. 😄

April Pieces Of My Mind #3

Magnolia in bloom
  • A boyhood memory. Tried to read the runes on Thrór’s map in The Hobbit, unaware that they are fictional dwarf runes, cirth. Made no sense, and several runes weren’t even in any of the Nordic futharks. But there was one recurring word: PSO. This, I later learned, was actually the English word THE.
  • One reason that I am poorly cut out to be a politician: I think it’s infuriatingly idiotic that voters get to decide what problems are real and what measures should be taken to solve them. I believe that voters do not know what is real, and even less do they know what measures might be effective.
  • The tinnitus I’ve had since a gig last autumn isn’t so bad. Mostly I don’t think about it at all. But it’s really noticeable when I wake up. A thin but very loud treble beep, poor treble hearing on my right ear. It soon recedes when I get up.
  • Looks increasingly like I’ll be writing a chapter of a gonzo-comedic historical novel set in 16th century Stockholm, and trying to pitch it in earnest. It’s a more realistic source of income than academic archaeology, and contract archaeology has proved entirely closed to me. Also it’s starting to feel like it might be kind of fun…
  • In addition to the Writers’ Union, I’m now also in the Translators’ Union.
  • Problems of your mid-50s: I brought the computer glasses instead of the reading glasses to the café.
  • Funny dialectal trait in parts of the US: they have a diphtong or even triphtong in the word “but”, pronouncing it BAH-et or BWAH-et. One of the guys on the excellent Common Descent podcast does this all the time.
  • What’s the atomic weight and electron affinity of elemental evil?
  • Ka-ching! I just clocked my 216th publication in archaeology. It’s a paper in a conference proceedings volume from the prestigious Jagellonian University in Kraków. D&D players will recognise this as a bunch of XP. I didn’t know when I devoted my life to the game of Academia that it doesn’t matter how many XP you get here. Whether you get to level up is mainly about being the DM’s favourite.
  • Sudden insight after decades. Harry Romaine’s “Turk and Brahmin, monk and Jew / Had reached Him through the gods they knew” is not an ecumenical universalist perspective. It’s a patronising Protestant perspective. That monk doesn’t represent Christians in general. He’s specifically the Catholic on a list of religious people whom Romaine considers misguided.
  • Alice Cooper’s “Poison” from 1989 is a pretty damn impressive song. Even if you don’t know that it’s from the 18th album of someone who’s come back from life-threatening substance abuse. ❤️
  • Oh no. Another unwanted mandatory update to my Samsung phone’s operating system. It will make the machine even slower. I just want the OS version it shipped with, plus one or two really pressing security patches. It’s plannedobsolescence. I hate you, Samsung.
  • When discussing gentrification, let’s recall that it is identical to the process that decreases crime, unemployment and segregation in a housing area. For anyone who can afford to stay on, gentrification is just great. The ones who can’t simply pop up in another poor area, and the process repeats.
  • I still have lists of the students who took Archaeology 101 for me in 2013-15. You can’t assume that everybody who takes that course wants to make a career of it. But I’d like to know how many professionals today count me among their teachers. So I checked if they have co-written any excavation reports. The percentage is 13%. Possibly a little more because of women who have changed their surnames and stayed in the archaeology business. I seem to have seven or eight disciples from those three semesters. One fellow, Andreas Widerberg, has put his name on 47 fieldwork reports since 2020!
  • When you search the Employment Agency’s website for the word “museum”, most of the hits are about personal care assistants for intellectually disabled people. Because those ads often mention taking the person you’re entrusted with on museum visits. I mean, yes, it is honest work and it is in a museum… 😄
  • For those about to hollyhock: we salute you
  • Blackbirds are singing and the magnolia is ready to bloom.
  • Oh, this is great. The Swedish Fascist Party has had veto power over government decisions since the 2022 election. Now their youth organisation has released an amateurishly produced election propaganda short film about Swedish nationalism, including a clip of white people dancing around a may pole. It’s from the 2019 hit horror movie Midsommar. That scene is preceded by drug taking and ends in human sacrifice and child rape. 😄 😄 😄
  • The neighbours’ scaredy cat came into our yard twice yesterday to drink out of the bird bath.
  • Whatever other skills I may have or lack as a game master, I am certainly a relentless convener who makes frequent, regular gaming sessions happen. A friend of mine likes to collect complete sets of books for RPGs, which he does not get to the table very often. So in ’23 I borrowed his Mutant Year Zero collection and ran 15 sessions. And this year I’m using his Coriolis books to run ~20 sessions. We’re both happy, and he doesn’t mind the wear.
  • I’m the ignorant nerd. I like almost everything nerds like, but I don’t really know anything about it. Show me a train, show me a retro videogame, show me a fossil, and I’ll be like “Aaah, beautiful, love this! Now tell me, what am I looking at?”
  • Awesome, there’s a well-lit corner with a leather armchair at the gig venue. I can read my book about early video games between bands! I don’t know anyone here anyway, and the noise level makes conversation a chore. Prog metal is such an uncool genre anyway, so I don’t even feel like a nerd.
  • My friend’s tiny dog looked a little confused when I lay down on the couch with my feet next to it. But then it was completely cool with sharing the couch with me for a long nap. ❤️
  • I see your full duplex modems and raise you a pen plotter.
  • In the 1985 video game Wizard’s Crown, you can own up to 8 characters that go armed into fantasy dungeons. But you only control one of them. The others try to tag along. But they’re so poorly programmed that they keep getting stuck behind obstacles as they attempt to move in a straight line towards their leader. 😄
  • Boomers never tire of telling us about how amazing the ’60s were. I just realised that if I manage to stay alive until I’m 88, I’ll get to experience the 2060s! Maybe I’ll take up smoking weed and playing the guitar.
  • My mom is mail bombing me with photos from the 80s and being really nostalgic about raising her children, and I’m like thanks but sorry, I’m busy being really nostalgic about raising my own kids in the 00s.
  • I wonder if the leadership and marketing departments at LinkedIn know that a considerable proportion of the site’s user base absolutely hate LinkedIn. Prominent among those are people who: 1. Do not want to network, just find a job. 2. Do not have a skill set that is in very high demand.
  • My high opinion of myself is difficult to reconcile with the labour market’s abysmal opinion of same.
  • Checked on my roses and perennials. Everything is coming along nicely, including the tickseed, Sw. höstöga, where all four plants are finally budding. But the damn fallow deer have messed up the tulips and the hylotelephium despite all the sheep-tallow spray. I’ve saved five tulips from ruin and moved them into a pot inside the board fence. I’ve got also four hollyhocks sprouting from seeds indoors.
  • In European politics, when someone mentions Left-wing extremism, they mean armed Communist revolutionaries. In the US, charmingly, they mean pro-business free-market Liberals. 😄
  • The national study loan agency asks if I belong to any of four categories that are apparently quite similar in some respect: PhD students, PhD graduates, military officers, convicts.
  • What would you do if you had half a year completely to yourself? Here’s my answer to that question. I’ve worked at a fairly leisurely pace. But I did not spend my seventh through twelfth month of unemployment watching TV. My main project since November is almost done now: a state-of-the-art typological, chronological and spatial analysis of a large group of stone axes that nobody had done anything about in 70 years. Hopefully in a journal soon.
  • Sweden’s pizza restaurants have been passed from one immigrant group to another since 1968. When I was a teen in the 80s, the Italians had already moved on: most places then were run by Kurds or Assyrians. Later the Yugoslavs took over. Followed by various Arabic speakers. Today, the Pizzeria Napoletana at the Saltsjöbaden shopping mall is run by Ukrainians. Their lunch menu offers pizza, pasta dishes and borscht.
  • My retrogames sommelier kid recommends Planescape Torment. She’s convinced that it would run fine on a c. 2010 Linux machine.
  • One of the parties in the Swedish parliament has twice the frequency of convicted criminals on their tickets for the September elections compared to the other parties. Yes, it’s the Fascists. Yes, they present themselves as tough on crime. Yes, it’s the party of small-town men with short education. Yes, they’re currently polling at 19% for parliament. Yay, democracy .
  • There’s a social scientist named Stranne who shows up in the news now and then. Always reminds me of Daniel “Stranne” Strandberg, a kid I hung out with online in the 90s. He drowned at like 22, caught by a sea current while swimming in Greece. Stranne, you were someone I only ever talked to because we both owned modems. But I remember you, pimples and all, and I wish you were still alive.
  • I agree that postal services have declined. I am not angry about this, because I understand the economics behind the change. It’s because of e-mail and online shopping. They have broken the former economy of scale. The postal service in your country would still function just fine if it were allowed to charge €10 for a postcard stamp and €100 for delivering a package of socks.
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