Aardvarchaeology - by Dr. Martin Rundkvist

https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com

Scandinavian archaeology, history, skepticism, books and music

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Last Notes

2026-08-20 11:18:28 UTC

##
August Pieces Of My Mind #2
The metamorphic proterozoic limestone on Runmarö attracted Medieval church builders in need of mortar. It erodes prettily!<li><a href="https://photos.app.goo.gl/6DHtLjCbtDCQhoKT9">Photographs</a> from my recent hike with Tech School Daughter in the mountains along the Norwegian border in Härjedalen.</li><li>The first computer in our house was a Sinclair ZX81 that my mom borrowed from work. I think I was 11 or 12. I had used a C64 before at my friend’s house, and found the ZX81’s keyboard modes mystifying. Every key did four different things depending on what mode the ZX81 decided to enter. When I tried to write a “Hello World” program in BASIC, each qwerty key suddenly output an entire BASIC command. I soon gave up.</li><li>My main form of exercise is cycling with podcasts.</li><li>Yay! The journal note about Erstavik Manor in the Viking and Middle Ages that I’ve written with my buddy, place-name scholar Per Vikstrand, has been accepted for publication. Look for it in Fornvännen 2026:3 or 4. It’s unusually personal for me: I’ve lived almost all my life on former land of this manor. And I think we’ve solved a big question here: why are there three early settlement names but only two plots?</li><li>Here’s an exercise tip: buy a clunky mom/dad bike, cast-iron frame and only three speeds. It’ll save you months at the gym. 😄</li><li>Movie: Mannen som slutade röka (1972). The son of a sausage-making industrialist stands to inherit a fortune — if he can quit smoking for one whole year. But the sum of one’s vices is a constant… Grade: good!</li><li>The Humanities are where it’s fairly cheap and easy to get into the best research journals, but extremely difficult to find a steady job. Stay away, kids, it’s a pyramid scheme.</li><li>Here’s how we bought Depeche Mode gig tickets in 1986. 1. Call booking on home phone, reserve tickets under your name. 2. Ride public transport to the Svala och Söderlund shop in Concert Hall? dM didn’t play there though. 3. State name at ticket window, pay for tickets with cash allowance that Mom had gotten from one of the new cash machines. Oh, and how did we even know that there would be a Depeche Mode gig? Ad in morning newspaper.</li><li>You have no idea how funny the Perseid Meteor Shower is to Finnish people.</li><li>A rolling stone was a Victorian lawn-care implement. It gathered no moss. Today the proverb means “You won’t grow old and boring if you keep moving and changing”. In the 1915 novel I’m reading, the proverb means “Settle down, quit moving and changing, or you will never be able to gather any capital”.</li><li>Jellyfish are getting much more common in the inner reaches of the Stockholm Archipelago. I don’t know if it’s a good or bad sign for the environment, but they’re lovely creatures. Very calming to watch them pulse their slow way through the water. ❤️</li><li>Somebody has made a habit of peeing on the microfilmed newspaper collection at the Carolina Rediviva library in Uppsala. Thousands of film rolls ruined. Sad and bizarre.</li><li>Eating crayfish in the yard. A little green metallic fly takes an interest. It ignores the distinction between crayfish and my pile of discarded shells.</li><li>The plotting of the novel Of Human Bondage takes a sudden left turn near the middle when the bookish, artistic main character suddenly falls in love with this sickly, surly, charmless, uneducated waitress at a café?! She has no interest in him whatsoever, always dismissive and borderline rude. It’s pretty obvious why this incongruous new plot thread is introduced here, specifically. This is the point in the highly autobiographical main character’s life where Somerset Maugham himself became a successful full-time writer and playwright, aged 23. Here’s where he couldn’t use his own life as the novel’s source material anymore, or the character would just have been sitting at his desk and occasionally going on holiday in France with some guy.</li><li>Idea for a story. Dude contacts counter-cult charity because he wants out. We eventually learn that he’s a cult leader with thousands of fanatical followers.</li><li>A bizarre and ugly episode in W. Somerset Maugham’s life. At almost 90 years of age, he tried to get his almost 50-y-o daughter declared illegitimate and not his own. The reason was that he wanted his 60ish male partner to inherit him, and the only way to do this was to adopt the guy. Which was not legally possible if he had any children already.</li><li>My eclipse experience in Stockholm was unimpressive in itself due to cloud haze. But I got to wander around Södermalm with a cheese grater! And I talked with a pretty lady with a dog, and she seemed to like me!</li><li>When thinking about what 1990s Norwegian Black Metal meant in its cultural context, it’s notable that this evil genre with its Satanic lyrics was created in a country where most people believed neither in God nor the Devil. A young Satanist musician was in fact more religious than the average Norwegian. He just wasn’t a Christian.</li><li>A genie in a bottle is a Flaschengeist in German.</li><li>The rent per sqm for a single-room apartment in Hallstahammar is 45% of that in Stockholm’s peripheral suburb Barkarby.</li><li>I look forward to creating a little extra home for myself in Hallstahammar. I’ll have to make a lot of thrift-store visits. Textiles, plants, a small bookshelf. Hope there will be an oven for baking. If not, then maybe there’s one in the staff kitchen at work. I have my own bread for breakfast every morning.</li><li>Went skinny dipping in glorious evening sunshine with my wife in the nearby lake in the woods. We’re really lucky to be living in such a thinly populated country. Walk south for ten minutes from our house and you’re in Greater Stockholm’s biggest forest. Walk north for ten minutes and you’re in the Baltic Sea. ❤️</li><li>The tracks at Stockholm Central are on the former lake bottom between Norrmalm and Blekholmen, “Fabric Bleaching Islet”. Weavers used to peg their linen weave onto the grass for UV bleaching.</li><li>Everybody looks so nice in their summer clothes ❤️</li><li>The train ride to my 2026 job uses a line I worked on excavations for as my 1993 job. The one back then actually led to an offer of steady employment, which I over-optimistically turned down.</li><li>I’m 54 and only now do I understand how an income tax deduction works. You don’t subtract the number from the tax. You subtract it from your gross income, and then the new lower income number is used to calculate your tax.</li><li>Svante in the Wednesday boardgames group told me about a piece of news he’d read, about a badly delusional man who had rung a doorbell in his underwear and tried to kill his neighbour. Armed with a cheese slicer.</li><li>Hallstahammar is a factory town of 10,000 in a municipality of 17,000. The population peaked around 1970 and has dwindled slowly since. But it’s just a 15 minute train ride from Sweden’s 6th largest town, Västerås. Around Stockholm, people go to absurd lengths to live that close to the city centre. I got an affordable rental apartment here in a matter of days.</li><li>The past seven years have been productive, but they’ve been professionally lonely and pretty samey. I’m delighted to have something radically new coming up, new places and faces and tasks!</li><li>Six weeks after publication, my collection of R.L. Stevenson translations is now available in 20 Swedish public libraries.</li><li>I’m not an obsessive fan of anything. I often react with “That was pretty OK” to books and movies that were life-defining to other people. I guess it comes with neurotypicity.</li><li>Chinese container carriers are now going counter-clockwise around Eurasia, from Ningbo and north of Siberia to Hamburg. This saves them time and lets them avoid getting anywhere near the Persian Gulf war zone. The longer use-window of this passage is a sign of the climate emergency.</li><li>Epropulsion is a brand of electric boat motors. Young fellow in shop, who seems to know little, pronounces this “Euro-pollution”.</li><li>I can sort of see the emotional logic of wanting to be a submissive trad wife if your husband is an authority figure outside the home, a man with lots of subordinates who brings home a major paycheck. But the extreme right is mainly working men, who at most may be bossing around a few apprentice pipe fitters. Do any women on the extreme right actually want to be subordinate to those men?</li><li>Movie: Notting Hill (1999). Charming rom-com about the love between a London bookseller and a Hollywood superstar. Grade: good!</li><li>Chargeable batteries are highly attractive to thieves. Bikes are often left in public spaces. For these reasons, all bike batteries can be locked to the bike. Apparently people don’t much leave their small boats chained to an unattended jetty. The battery in an electric outboard motor usually can’t be locked in place.</li><li>For the first time in my life, I’ve maxed out the unemployment benefit and been thrown out the other end of the dole machinery. But it’s OK. I have savings, I have a new job starting 15 October, I have two paid gigs before then, and I have no dependents. Don’t do a Humanities PhD!</li><li>Axfood’s ecological black tea labeled “Garant” has the unmistakable barnyard scent of Pu Er.</li><li>I have stayed at three writers’ retreats in recent years. One thing I’ve learned is that they are a lot like mountain hiking cabins in one respect: there is always left-behind food. Pasta, oatmeal, flour and olive oil are always there.</li><li>Four ?Medieval lime kilns at Lerkila-Storholmen. Massive structures. Stockholm needed mortar. Runmarö had limestone and fuel. Shipping quickline is dangerous though. Take in too much water and the cargo expands, splitting your ship like an orange.</li><li>Lime kilning on Runmarö ended fairly abruptly when Sweden grabbed Gotland from the Danes in 1645. Gotland lime was cheaper and better.</li><li>I was shocked and dismayed when I learned about US debating societies. The judges emphasise number of arguments spoken per minute. Not oratory, not eloquence. It’s a speed-talking competition. 🙄</li><li>The second-largest party in the Swedish parliament (21%, polling at 20%) is an extreme-right populist outfit named SD. Their intended Attorney General is named Jomshof. I know that this sounds crazy. But the fact is that a few weeks before an election where SD is painting itself on posters as cuddly and nostalgic, the party leader has published a book by Jomshof where he attacks the country’s 2nd-largest religious affiliation furiously. Jomshof describes Islam as similar to Nazism (which is the root of SD itself) and calls for a holy war against it. Is this a smart move during the election campaign? No. It reminds everyone that SD is a bunch of small-town extremist crooks and idiots. And SD knows fully well that their constituents are more invested in cheap gas (again, idiots) than in xenophobia. Attorney General hopeful Jomshof has scored a gigantic home goal. 😄</li><li>Frank Beard has died. Only one original ZZ Top member remains. Listen to their 1973 album Tres Hombres!</li><li>Yay! Praehistorische Zeitschrift has accepted my manuscript, “Shouldered shafthole stone axes of the Late Bronze Age in south-east Sweden”.</li><li>Somebody gave me an old polyester fleece cardigan. Now I realise that it’s made me the world’s most discreet cross-dresser. The zipper. It’s the other way around! I am a lady!</li><li>Fixed two of the writers’ retreat’s bikes. Must buy WD-40 for the chains and the saddle pillars. People shift these saddles up and down a lot since there’s three new members here every week.</li><li>OK software people, if you’re going to demand that I follow a template when choosing a password (number of characters, case, additional symbols), then you should tell me what the fucking template was when one day you ask me to remember that password.</li><li>Filling out the participant form for my local scifi convention, organised by members of my gaming group. “I’m an archaeologist who makes a habit of infiltrating scifi conventions and giving pop-science lectures.”</li><li>My joke for years now has been that I’m useful for any event organiser who needs to pad their programming with a token grey-bearded, bald, white, straight cis-male. I tick a lot of boxes. 🙄</li><li>Annoying news site behaviour: interesting headline leads to a fucking film clip or podcast. No, I read my news. I use YouTube only to learn boardgames and tie my neck tie.</li>
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2026-08-10 05:00:00 UTC

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August Pieces Of My Mind #1
Cycled over Djurö Bridge at sunset<li>Repeat after me please: GÜNZ MINDEL RISS WÜRM</li><li>Apparently there’s never been a Sámi member of the Swedish parliament. Not quite sure. Of course, the Sámi are less than 1/359th of the Swedish population. But surprising nevertheless. Henrik Blind of the Greens will probably be the first in September.</li><li>Two women are discussing accountancy over speakerphone here in a garbled mix of Mandarin and Swedish.</li><li>Pulling together a fortune has never been a life priority of mine. And I’m really keen that people who make that a priority should not have more political influence than I have. In fact, I oppose all legislation that mainly benefits people who are richer than me. The bottom 95% should not do the top 5% any political favours. Let me say this again: I don’t want to get rich and I want to make it extremely hard for you to get rich too. Or poor.</li><li>I want to be like Scarlett Johansson in that Besson movie. I want to use more than 10% of my brain and turn into a USB memory stick.</li><li>When I read about slashed funding for the university humanities I always think to myself, “If you had honoured my qualifications I’d probably be protesting alongside you now.” The most secure position any Scandy university ever gave me was one semester at 55% of full-time employment. Don’t come crying to the precariat when your tenured job evaporates. *shrug*</li><li>“The measures needed to deal with the climate emergency are not acceptable to the voters.” This just means “I am more concerned about getting re-elected than about the climate emergency.” Or in other words, the climate emergency cannot be dealt with within democracy. And I certainly don’t believe any dictatorship would do better. We’re just fucked, caught in a problem many of us can’t even understand. It started with the first steam engine around 1700.</li><li>After I left the Rolsta excavation, they found a sunken-floored hut with part of a rotary quern and some pottery on the floor! 11/12th century?</li><li>We should look at the climate emergency not as a slow and steady process, but as an ongoing explosion. The fuse was lit around 1700. Now we’re in the BANG part of the explosive event. 100 years from now there will be a period when the debris rains down and settles on any survivors.</li><li>Hey everybody, let’s not have sex in a hammock. OK? It’s a hassle.</li><li>Had half an hour’s nap, awoke a little woozy as usual, compensating with a cup of Camellia sinensis var. assamica PG-Tips.</li><li>The AI bubble is a moronic episode on our way to climate collapse, driven by greed and dishonesty. But really, shredding one copy of each printed book is nothing. Let me know when they shred the manuscript of Beowulf or the Codex Regius of the Edda.</li><li>I look forward to vacationing in post-war Ukraine.</li><li>Hehe. I asked Google’s LLM which has been my northernmost fieldwork site. It confidently and incorrectly pointed out Sättuna. Because I wrote a paper about that site whose title mentions that one of the finds is the northernmost of its kind. LLMs calculate what the next word should be… 😄</li><li>Love how dogs signal that they are in the mood to play tag. ❤️😄</li><li>Small-town working men who vote Fascist are like “We’re going to be replaced by immigrants!” And big-city higher-ed graduates are like “Why are you saying this as if there’s a problem and it’s an important issue?”</li><li>The formerly governing Polish populist party PiS has split up into fractions! 😄</li><li>The Swedish Fascists are currently looking feeble in the polls. They will very likely lose a percentile unit for the first time in the September election, after 16 years of growth. Meanwhile, their “charismatic” leader is past his prime, the longest-serving chairperson of any current party, and looking tired. There is good reason to hope for an ugly leadership squabble after the election. 👍️</li><li>Sudden insight. There’s a reason for why I consider it absolutely idiotic when Swedes incorporate English usages in their Swedish. It’s because I’m bilingual after two childhood years in the US. I’ve spent 50 years making damn sure that I keep these two particular languages separate.</li><li>Impressively comprehensive dictionary of <a href="https://pelgranepress.com/roleplaying-games-101/">role-playing game terminology</a>.</li><li>Interesting new energy tech on its way to my area. A company is building a 5,300 sqm battery park. Simple business model: buy electricity when it’s cheap, sell it when it’s expensive. Forward-looking.</li><li>I wonder if the use of old (how old are they really?) books to train language models will re-awaken old usages in English. Like when people try to argue that the mistake they make today is legit because it’s attested from 1704. And has been abandoned since. 😄</li><li>I just accidentally boiled a spider and added it to my cup of tea. Surprised to find it at the bottom of my cup after finishing it. I guess that counts as a nourishing broth?</li><li>Nobody likes Iran’s theocratic dictatorship. But some of their many opponents are quite odd. Yesterday I saw a large group of Iranians gatecrashing the Stockholm Pride parade. Known as “Royalists”, they were waving pictures of the deposed Shah’s son, a US flag, an Israeli flag, and lots of pre-1980 Iranian flags. Not an improvement, in my opinion. Get this: the Royalists were not counter-protesting the pride parade. They were uninvited participants. 🙃</li><li>Watching a mink gamboling on the sea surface at dusk. I know there are some around here, but this is the first one I see. Not a great fit for the local ecosystem, but neither are we. Give it 500 years and things will straighten themselves out.</li><li>Thinking of setting myself up as a secular materialist guru. A neo-Epicurean. I’ll teach that there isn’t anything more than this, that you can’t attain wisdom, and that nothing you go through in life means anything.</li><li>Incredible source material: a preserved 1585 correspondence between top nobility brothers Erik & Johan Sparre (35 & 34 yrs) about which of their lower-gentry clients to marry off pregnant Polish noblewoman Poletta von Zijlen (15) to. Johan has promised Poletta marriage while actually betrothed to someone with much more powerful relatives. They’re furious. She eventually marries Erik Bagge and has another 3 children w him. He gets a lot of confiscated land back.</li><li>Johan Sparre’s by-blow with young Poletta, Ingeborg, lives to age 93 and becomes ancestress of a huge number of Småland petty nobility, including the Reuter of Skälboö lineage.</li><li>Heinlein’s 1973 novel Time Enough For Love is crap. It’s talky and uneventful. It’s full of libertarian preachy asides. It’s got this really weird attitude to women, kind of like a man born in 1907 trying to keep up with 1970s feminism. One fifth of the way through the book the preamble still wasn’t finished, so I gave up.</li><li>It’s artificial, all right. But it’s not intelligence.</li><li>Hugo Fröderberg has long been an infamous name in medical ethics because as head of clinic he condoned the Vipeholm caries experiment, where intellectually disabled patients were used as guinea pigs. That was his lesser crime. Fröderberg was a serial murderer. He ordered his staff to stop feeding the most heavily disabled patients during WW2, and wrote them false cause of death certificates. But everyone was still weighed regularly. The data speak clearly.</li><li>In Neanderthal studies, it has long been argued that they were quite human in their feelings for each other. Because some of them survived into feeble old age, clearly being cared for and fed by younger people. By the same token, we can infer that Hugo Fröderberg had less human compassion than a typical Neanderthal person.</li><li>I have two computers. One that’s really slow but can connect to the Internet. One that’s fast enough for my needs but can’t, because it’s gone glitchy and most days doesn’t remember that it has any network hardware. When I start my new job in October I’m getting a used laptop that isn’t too old, and it’ll be a relief.</li><li>A lot of people seem to believe that if you ask an LLM to look through a database and calculate something, or extract data according to some criteria, then it will do exactly what you ask for. It won’t. It will calculate an output that looks normal. And you won’t discover this unless you do the same operation manually and compare.</li><li>Read the phrase “medical aid in dying”. Thought to myself, “No thanks. I don’t even need medical aid in living.”</li><li>Wednesday was 14 years since the Curiosity rover landed on Mars. It’s driven almost 38 kilometres since. ❤️</li><li>I want to browse a big used book store.</li><li>It’s 2026. I still have to tell mainstream spreadsheet software NOT TO FUCKING TREAT COLUMN HEADERS AS DATA WHEN SORTING OH YOU FUCKING MUPPETS THERE ARE 2000 POWER USER FEATURES IN THIS SHIT BUT YOU CAN’T GET THE BASIC THING I USE EVERY DAY RIGHT. Also I’m bilingual and exceptionally tired of the endless list of languages I have to select from in LibreOffice’s spell checker. It should have four slots for me to fill.</li><li>Movie: Resan till Melonia (1989). Animated environmentalist re-telling of The Tempest. Grade: OK. In the villains’ corporate headquarters are five portraits on the wall. Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet and Thatcher.</li><li>I wonder what’s eventually going to end the grinding multi-year standstill in Ukraine. It seems the Russians are paying way more in all kinds of resources for every day that the front doesn’t move.</li><li>The German expression dem Erdboden gleichzumachen is pretty heavy. It means “the ground surface to level-with-make”, flattening a structure completely.</li><li>Today’s five weeks until Swedish voters get rid of the useless, fascist-dependent Kristersson government!</li><li>I spared myself from applying for a museum job in Hudiksvall, at 61°44′ N. Because I think November and December are depressing enough in Stockholm, at 59°20′ N.</li>
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2026-07-12 14:25:07 UTC

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Best reads of 2026, Q1-Q2
Here are my best reads in English during January through June. Dear Reader, what were your best recent reads?<li>The Peripheral. William Gibson 2014.</li><li>Titus Groan. Mervyn Peake 1946.</li><li>Dungeons and Desktops: the History of Computer Role-Playing Games. Matt Barton 2008.</li><li>Non-coloring Book. George Hrab 2007.</li><li>The Castle of Otranto. Horace Walpole 1764.</li><li>Trail of Cthulhu. Kenneth Hite 2008.</li><li>The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Cory Doctorow 2026.</li>
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2026-06-27 06:06:04 UTC

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June Pieces Of My Mind #2
Boxholm Ironworks Museum<li>Among concert sound technicians, Ulf Lundell’s guitar playing used to be known as “the white noise channel”.</li><li>It’s a particular summer feeling on a June day with lots of greenery, but overcast and a little drizzle.</li><li>Mad King Erik, who suffered from paranoid delusion, believed that homeless beggars might be spies.</li><li>There was a market for garden plants in 1560s Stockholm. The town’s poor house bought them for its kitchen garden. Plants, not seeds.</li><li>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.</li><li>All Catholic churches dedicated to Saint Nicholas, such as Old Stockholm’s town church, are homes to the cult of Santa Claus.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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. 😁</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>Books are a good invention. 👍️</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>I would like to see no bailouts at all after this crash please.</li><li>Eyehategod’s guitarist looks a lot like the elderly Sir Richard Francis Burton in his Trieste days.</li><li>Capitalism is the economic system with market crashes and extreme economic inequality.</li><li>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.</li><li>Is string theory still being funded and still unable to make any empirically testable predictions?</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>Huge depositions of 1st century BC metalwork from <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/vehicles-of-change-two-exceptional-deposits-of-destroyed-chariots-or-wagons-from-late-iron-age-britain/729BB6B21858170704D32CBDBF68C5DA">destroyed wagons</a> found near York and next to a top-level British hillfort settlement.</li><li>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?</li><li>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.</li><li>Jethro Tull’s 1987 song “Budapest” is a Dire Straits song with some flute. The loans are many and exact.</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>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?</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>The original disco audience is 75 now. Boney M are on the cover of the old-folks magazine Kvällsstunden.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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”.</li><li>Drove past a store with the surreal word SOFFKONCEPT on the front. Buy a Sofa Concept. Buy it today!</li><li>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.</li>
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2026-06-12 05:00:00 UTC

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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.

2026-06-10 11:27:29 UTC

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June Pieces Of My Mind #1
1903 steam ship, 1923 city hall<li>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.</li><li>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!</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>Imagine if we could reclaim all the time we’ve spent explaining the difference between memory and disk to Boomers.</li><li>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.</li><li>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!</li><li>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.</li><li>A little sad and wistful for no reason on this sunny summer evening.</li><li>Cycling home, I saw a badger! ❤️</li><li>“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</li><li>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”! 👂️👂️👂️</li><li>Friluftsfrämjandet Vaxholm organises full-moon sea kayaking in August. Sounds wonderful!</li><li>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. 😄</li><li>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. 😄</li><li>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.</li><li>There’s a paleobotanist that I know at this rooftop bar.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>Checked why Le Monde keeps going on about something called “Roland-Garros”. It’s a tennis stadium (boo) named for an aviation pioneer (yay).</li><li>We’re still in the middle third of the 2020s. The final third starts on 1 September. That’s the late 2020s.</li><li>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. 😄</li><li>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.</li><li>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. 😁</li><li>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.</li><li>Our insect hotel and birdbath are in high demand now. ❤️</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>Someone I care about has turned 83 and thus beaten current Swedish life expectancy for men despite several strokes! ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>The collar of the white shirt I wore on two steam ships Saturday is black inside from the coal smoke.</li><li>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!</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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”.</li><li>Love Leaf Hound</li><li>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.</li><li>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”. 😄</li><li>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!</li><li>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?</li>
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2026-06-05 05:00:00 UTC

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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:<li>Deliver a possibly dangerous space-battle AI to an anti-piracy flotilla</li><li>Convince an indigenous queen to stop aiding the pirates</li><li>Assassinate their patron’s political opponent (though they figured out that this task was a setup by a double agent)</li><li>Escape the law after two players tried to assassinate their own main opponent</li><li>Investigate rumours about a rebel training camp</li><li>Give a series of problematic passengers rides through a war-torn system</li><li>Figure out who the teenager found adrift in an escape pod is (the son of the pirate leader)</li>
** Vilddjurets öga, Ikonernas algebra, Arams hemlighet, Det döende skeppet*
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2026-06-01 05:00:00 UTC

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May Pieces Of My Mind #3
Opening ceremony of the Stockholm Tolkien Society’s anniversary<li>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. 🙄</li><li>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.</li><li>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</li><li>Greek cowgirl gun desperado in the Wild West: Kalamata Jane</li><li>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.</li><li>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”.</li><li>I’ve placed the data for my stone axes study in two online repositories: <a href="https://archive.org/details/rundkvist-2026-axe-dataset">[1]</a> <a href="https://pub.raa.se/visa/dokumentation/">[2]</a>.</li><li>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.</li><li>Most of today’s Swedish care assistants were born outside the EU.</li><li>The first mason bees of the summer have arrived in our bee hotel. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>1/6 men at this Left Party prep event.</li><li>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.</li><li>Since three years ago, CD Baby no longer sells any CDs.</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>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”.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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… 😄</li><li>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.</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.”</li>
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2026-05-21 20:13:48 UTC

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May Pieces Of My Mind #2
Danvikstull Bridge<li>Lilacs starting to bloom, weeks earlier than in the 70s.</li><li>Mad King Eric XIV murdered at least two unarmed civilians: one with a dagger, the other with a wrought-iron poker.</li><li>Love the geeky grey-bristled audience at stoner rock gigs. There are always some senior original Sabbath fans. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>Someone should put huge signs at the road into Mönsterås, reading: MONSTER ASS</li><li>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.)</li><li>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”.</li><li>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!</li><li>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”.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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!</li><li>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.</li><li>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!</li><li>An old fellow came to my RPG sesh yesterday with about 1.5 litres of dice, kept in a crocheted old-lady’s hat. ❤️🎲</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>Ran into my older daughter on the bus, held her makeup case while we had a good chat. ❤️</li><li>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.”</li><li>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.</li><li>Isn’t there a magical shield inside a giant toad in Village of Hommlet? Man, early D&D scenarios are ridiculous.</li><li>Many women who lived in 1560s Stockholm were married three times because husbands 1 and 2 died.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li>
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2026-05-11 05:00:00 UTC

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May Pieces Of My Mind #1
<li>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. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>It would be less confusing, more consistent, if I was unemployed and people thought my talks and my research were boring. 🤔</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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”. 😄</li><li>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!</li><li>Yay! Friendly local game store Alphaspel is sponsoring our High Society tournament at LinCon with three copies of the game!</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.”</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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?</li><li>As it turns out, my old buddies really like Krupnik, Polish pistachio Bailey’s.</li><li>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.</li><li>I just had a nibble from an employer for a short fieldwork gig. Hell yeah, said I! Like a recent BA graduate. 😄</li>
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2026-05-01 05:00:00 UTC

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April Pieces Of My Mind #3
Magnolia in bloom<li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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…</li><li>In addition to the Writers’ Union, I’m now also in the Translators’ Union.</li><li>Problems of your mid-50s: I brought the computer glasses instead of the reading glasses to the café.</li><li>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.</li><li>What’s the atomic weight and electron affinity of elemental evil?</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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!</li><li>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… 😄</li><li>For those about to hollyhock: we salute you</li><li>Blackbirds are singing and the magnolia is ready to bloom.</li><li>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. 😄 😄 😄</li><li>The neighbours’ scaredy cat came into our yard twice yesterday to drink out of the bird bath.</li><li>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.</li><li>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?”</li><li>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.</li><li>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. ❤️</li><li>I see your full duplex modems and raise you a pen plotter.</li><li>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. 😄</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>My high opinion of myself is difficult to reconcile with the labour market’s abysmal opinion of same.</li><li>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.</li><li>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. 😄</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li><li>My retrogames sommelier kid recommends Planescape Torment. She’s convinced that it would run fine on a c. 2010 Linux machine.</li><li>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 .</li><li>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.</li><li>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.</li>
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2026-04-20 08:31:01 UTC

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April Pieces Of My Mind #2
Yachting season approaches in the Duvnäsviken Inlet<li>Sweden is pretty much back to where only rich people can afford to write fiction. With the difference that 200 years ago, before professional writers, there was a reading public that wanted to buy fiction in Swedish. Today, they only want to buy simple detective novels, preferably as audio books. A Swedish Umberto Eco would have a really, really hard time today finding a publisher for The Name of the Rose. The audience is gone.</li><li>Disheartened to find that museology courses are largely about “deconstructing the discourse” rather than “running a museum competently”. I’ve always really detested the post-modern humanities.</li><li>Someone I care about had his first stroke nine years ago today. He’s had one additional big one since, but several years ago now. He actually seems more bothered by completely unrelated eyesight problems. Still, he cooks and bakes and works in the garden and seems pretty happy.</li><li>The Scandy languages like long sequences of consonants, and not just for reasons of coding non-Latin sounds with the Latin alphabet. The SKS in Fisksätra, where I live, is a problem to many immigrants. But the place has a pet name in typical Stockholm style: Fiskis. So a lot of people call it Fiskis-ätra.</li><li>As an old fan of King Gizzard and the 70s prog rock & kraut & fusion that inspired them, I’m smugly pleased to announce that Angine de Poitrine are great! Though not as musically innovative as many think. Definitely check them out!</li><li>Game design contest organiser: “Yes, this is just like a bake-off, only some of the cakes taste pretty bad”.</li><li>Played four boardgames prototypes. All were too low in player interaction for my taste. I know that this style of game is hugely popular. But I make a point of asking every designer how I can nuke whatever the guy to my right is building.</li><li>The Coriolis 2016 RPG offers a useful definition: “Researcher (archaeologist) – whether you’re excavating ruins in the desert or unravelling the mysteries of gravity ponds, you’re the true explorer.” (Swedish core rulebook p. 19)</li><li>I’m at the point in my scientific career where I can discover five days ahead that I’m scheduled to give half an hour’s talk about gold foil figures to an audience of the world’s foremost specialists, and this does not bother me. But I’m also at the point where I’m applying to undergrad museum curator courses to make myself employable. 🙄</li><li>When I see people wax over-enthusiastic on LinkedIn about seemingly pointless projects at their workplaces, my reactions are these: a) I am hostile to your organisation and I hope it will be shut down soon, b) I would be depressed and/or unable to take it seriously if I had to work on one of your projects for a living.</li><li>Someone one Bluesky comments: “As you trace the ancient curves of those stone axes, know that your creative and analytical energy mirrors the cosmos crafting new forms — and you can track those cyclical rhythms of productivity and intuition at [astrology website]”</li><li>Good news: my multi-skilled friend Cheyenne has a new job. She is now a LÄNSHEMSLÖJDSKONSULENT, literally a “county home crafts advisor”. This position exists to support and encourage traditional crafts as hobbies.</li><li>“Singer-songwriter” is a hopelessly vague term and should be dropped.</li><li>Mood: restlessly, impatiently productive.</li><li>Yay! Two out of eight hollyhock seeds have sprouted! I’m sure there will be more sprouts tomorrow night. Not only is this way cheaper than buying plants, it’s much more fun too! ❤️</li><li>You need to listen to “Freelance Fiend” by Leafhound. Trust me.</li><li>Mervyn Peake was a wildly creative genius writer. But he could not handle a shift from past tense to present tense narration correctly. Any editor can fix that kind of thing though, despite lacking that creativity.</li><li>Geocacher contacts me about some writing in tengwar that contains a clue to a cache of mine. He’s confused because he’s convinced that it’s the Ring verse. Hello? It’s an alphabet? If you see Arabic writing on a package of Medjoul dates, do you assume that it’s a Quran quotation?</li><li>Someone on Goodreads, commenting on Titus Groan, is astonished that the book does not conform to the fantasy genre tropes established by Tolkien — nine years after Peake’s novel. *facepalm*</li><li>Hard-won social skills from 35 years of seminars: I’m the third person or more to put up my hand, and I speak as tersely as possible.</li><li>I am a very poor mingler. I flee from mingling situations. It’s very much not a question of me being shy. It’s because it bores me to tears. I wonder how much of my career problems through the years have come down to the fact that it is impossible to kick back and have a beer with me.</li><li>Imagine a large lake or sea surface, densely and evenly dotted with islands. Now remove a clutch of islands, creating an open space bounded by the dense island pattern. Does your language have a specific word that only refers to such an open body of water? Cool, then you’re a Swede and the word is FJÄRD.</li><li>Pleased to find that there are currently 155 copies of my 2025 fiction translations in public libraries. This of course can’t impress Americans, but it’s like having 155 copies in a single one of your most populous states.</li><li>The Employment Agency thinks it’s kind of pointless for me to continue applying for archaeologist jobs. When I’ve identified professionally as an archaeologist since I was 20. For many, this might trigger a mid-life crisis. But not for me. Because the job ads labelled “Archaeologist” are almost all about working on highway projects, whereas I’ve spent my life as an archaeology research scholar. So I agree. Applying for archaeologist jobs really is a waste of my time as an archaeologist.</li><li>The Uppsala-Stockholm train is excellent for napping.</li><li>Wednesday: Employment Agency recommends working as a delivery driver. Friday: recommends working in a care home for the elderly.</li><li>Swedes are so unfamiliar with metal detectors that they will commonly call the person using the device “a metal detector”. This is like calling a family member vacuuming the house “the vacuum cleaner”.</li><li>I’m cynical, frivolous, hedonistic, and I try to get away with not taking seriously a lot of things that people get paid to take very, very seriously.</li><li>A good LLM should tailor spelling and grammar in its output to the quality of the prompting. Clearly a person who prompts an LLM in poor English is expecting and demanding output in poor English.</li><li>Bottom level gangsters aren’t always super smart, haven’t always got great overview of consequences. During an attempted murder in Nacka last summer, the escape driver was wearing an ankle monitor. 🙄</li><li>Both my brilliant grown-up kids are on stage the same spring, doing a solid & spirited acting job, making their moms and dad proud. I’m very glad that I got to experience this! ❤️</li><li>I’ve made a point of going everywhere in the archaeology of the mid-to-late 1st millennium elite, ticking boxes, trying to become an unavoidable scholar. I’ve excavated a mead hall, a boat grave, a great barrow. I’ve written about gold bracteates, gold foil figures, jewellery and weaponry. I’ve metal detected famous sites. And today <a href="https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/pz-2025-2036/html">my big animal art paper</a> came out. I’m confident that this will be cited like crazy moving forward.</li><li>Went to a 60th birthday party. It’s quite strange that people that age are now nostalgic for pop music that I remember from my childhood. The punks are all retired.</li><li>“[Olduvai] takes its name from the Maasai word oldupai which means “the place of the wild sisal” as the East African wild sisal (Sansevieria ehrenbergii) grows abundantly throughout the gorge area.” /Wikipedia</li><li>I would have loved my wife even if she’d been a majority-population Swede. But I gotta say, it really adds to the fun and joy of this long marriage that she’s from the other end of Eurasia and has this huge cultural competence which I lack entirely. Whoever you marry, there’s no guarantee that it’ll work out. But it’s a source of pride and joy to me that my wife has all these perspectives that would have been closed to me without her.</li><li>My next project will be a big, expensive, glossy trilobite porn coffee-table book. All expertly lit photographs of trilobites killed by mud slides while mating.</li><li>Oh cool, tenacious local crank Bob G. Lind has a new book out. This time it’s not about what happened in prehistoric Scania. It’s a collection of clairvoyant experiences, his own and others’, at some standing stones. He’s seen the deaths of Carolus XII, Olof Palme and a regional serial killer’s victim in 1989, and he tells his readers all about it!</li><li>I feel a sick fascination for abortive attempts at organisation. People who create a system for storing and retrieving things (such as a ring binder or labelled boxes), or a schedule for when tasks need to be done, or a list of rules for some venue or activity. And then they immediately forget about the whole thing. Because they are too poorly organised to stick to a system of rules that they themselves created. This powerlessness in the face of one’s one mess is utter horror to me.</li>
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2026-04-05 13:27:38 UTC

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The Pointless Death of Cellini’s Brother
Two of Italy’s most famous historical autobiographers are the Florentinian Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) and the Venetian Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798). They have a lot in common: extreme talent, extreme self-aggrandisement, high energy, a wandering lifestyle, and an obvious empathy deficiency. In other words: they were two brilliant, narcissistic psychopaths. Reading their books is much more entertaining than it would have been to deal with them in person.
Young Casanova [certainly got around](https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2022/03/17/giacomo-casanova-got-around/ ). But today I want to relate an episode in Cellini’s book that struck me as horrifically telling about what life was like in 1520s Italy. It’s the violent deaths of at least four men and boys, including Cellini’s younger brother Giovanfrancesco, through a revenge spiral in the early summer of 1529. Gio had undergone military training and was at this point a 25-y-o soldier employed by Duke Alessandro de Medici, the teenage future ruler of Florence.
1. On the morning of 26 May, a detachment of armed city guards is marching Captain Cisti through the streets of Rome to jail for some unspecified crime. Cellini, who loves to exaggerate, gives their number as “over 50”.
2. As they pass a popular soldier bar in the Banchi district, just across the river from the Castel Sant’ Angelo, the prisoner notices Captain Cattivanza there. He shouts “If you want the money I owe you, you should come and get it now”.
3. Cattivanza baits four beardless soldier boys at the bar to go and get the money.
4. The four boys attack the town guards and get beaten: three flee with wounds, young Aldobrandi is seriously wounded and falls.
5. Gio Cellini is asleep on a chair at the soldier bar, apparently still quite drunk after a night on the town. Young Aldrobrandi is a favourite protegé of his. Gio wakes up, learns what has happened, gives off a tremendous roar and runs out to avenge his friend. He gets into the thick of the guard detachment and runs through Aldrobrandi’s killer with his rapier. One of the guardsmen shoots him in the leg with a hand cannon, a primitive firearm.
6. Gio dies from blood loss the next morning after describing the gunman to his brother, the autobiographer Benvenuto.
7. Several weeks later, Benvenuto murders the gunman from behind in the street with a dagger, and is identified by bystanders.
8. Benvenuto Cellini, police murderer, has no legal trouble because of this, because many feel that the revenge was justified. And probably more importantly, because he is a personal protegé of the Pope, for whom he is working as a goldsmith.

2026-03-20 06:00:00 UTC

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March Pieces Of My Mind #2
The ZZ plant suddenly blooms!? *Zamioculcas zamiifolia*, native to East Africa.<li>I know an old jazz musician who lives in Balling, Jutland. Little Richard has told us that by golly, Miss Molly sure likes to ball. I just wrote to my friend and told him that I believe both Mr. Richard and Miss Molly would enjoy Balling.</li><li>Today’s afternoon snack: Yunnan tea and glutinous rice dumplings filled with sugar and sesame seed. Mark my words, this is how an unsuspecting young Swedish man eventually ends up after leaving a party in 1999 together with a pretty Chinese girl!</li><li>The LLM epidemic is not just a financial bubble. It’s a mass psychosis as to the capability of the technology, quite apart from the financial aspects.</li><li>My music randomiser served up “When The Stars Go Blue”, and I wondered idly, what’s Ryan Adams been up to lately? He released his 33rd studio album last year.</li><li>Isterband is tubular haggis. Pölsa is freeform haggis. Fight me.</li><li>Re-reading Peake reminds me of the long-forgotten feeling of delving into complicated older English prose far above my level of reading comprehension as a boy. I remember it not being easy, but fun enough, and it sure was an education!</li><li>Having a hard time getting your nonsense poetry into print? Do what Mervyn Peake did! Write a really good, grotesque and absurd novel and just paste the poetry into it with some flimsy excuse for why it’s in the story! ❤️</li><li>My wife got a medal for her volunteer work teaching immigrant ladies and children to swim!</li><li>Soft plastic handles are planned obsolescence in kitchen utensils. Don’t buy that shit.</li><li>Reading about celebrities who mix the strongest uppers with the strongest downers, a.k.a. speedballing, and have heart attacks. This does not seem like a good idea to me. I am instead going to continue to mix tea and milk.</li><li>Listening to a documentary about unfortunate idealists who bought an old rural care home near Stockholm in 1997, renovated it for communal living and capped the looow selling price of apartments — while housing prices rose 20% annually in the area. Everyone bought super cheaply. Everyone had a huge economic incentive to change the commune’s bylaws and cash in. Chaos ensued.</li><li>Suddenly remember how for middle-school algebra, I made a confused and abortive attempt to get the GW-BASIC interpreter to solve equations for me. As I remember it, I thought that functions such as LET X=Y*3 could have anything to the left of the equals sign. I was ~13.</li><li>I bet I’d make a pretty good hiking hostel receptionist. Sadly nobody seems to be hiring senior Humanities academics for that kind of role.</li><li>My book of Edith Nesbit translations is doing great at the public libraries! 47 copies registered in only six weeks. The Lord Dunsany book hasn’t even got twice that number after ten months.</li><li>Reading about a young fellow with autism who made 28 failed applications to undergo basic training in the Swedish armed forces. The Equality Ombudsman is suing the military on his behalf and ready to take the case to the Supreme Court. Because he was denied on the grounds of autism. I think anyone who applies more than twice should automatically be ineligible, autism or no autism. It has always been a core recruitment task to weed out the over-enthusiastic.</li><li>Haha, remember the job I interviewed for in Norway two months ago? They went against the evaluation committee’s recommendation and <a href="https://www.khrono.no/klart-best-kvalifisert-ifolgje-fagekspertane-vraka-til-fordel-for-intern-kandidat/1044316">hired their local buddy</a> with a middling CV who already had a part-time teaching gig there. Scandy academic hiring practices are mostly local friendship corruption. In Sweden 60-70% of everyone with the professor title is still at the department where they received their PhD. A large majority.</li><li>When buying WordPerfect in 1987 for my desktop PC whose only link to the surrounding world was a 2400 bps modem and a copper telephone wire, I don’t remember having any feeling that the Wordperfect Corporation wanted to spy on me, sell my personal information, enshittify the software and fund global fascism. Maybe there is a market for similar products today as well.</li><li>It’s 2026. The UK removes the last hereditary seats from its parliament.</li><li>Sure, you can try to use our smart TV to spy on us in our home. But first you’ve got to plug it into the power socket, which is almost always disconnected.</li><li>Saw Fjärde Väggen, a really funny meta play by Rumle Vierth Lemhagen, staged to good effect with an unpaid amateur ensemble. I’ve seen far less interesting plays with professionals. That piece should be picked up by some pros, and RVL should write more plays.</li><li>The Beatles’ twelve albums were released over a period of seven years and two months. Imagine a band that had done what they did for pop music from January 2019 until today. I often don’t even take note of a good band before they have disbanded.</li><li>RPG misunderstanding yesterday. The 2nd group consisted of bright and sweet teenagers who seemed unfamiliar with the concept of hex crawling. At least the most vocal group member was expecting a convention scenario that could be solved. Not four hours exploring a sandbox. They were visibly frustrated halfway through the sesh. Of course, I had a finale prepared that I planned to activate ten minutes before the end of the schedule slot. I pressed that button very much earlier.</li><li>Two RPG sessions ago, Åsa’s Near East space-opera intelligence officer died in a gunfight against religious fanatics. I just made a new character for her and named her after the first Armenian woman Olympic medalist, Nina Muradyan.</li><li>You know clickable links on web pages that open in a new tab? I am full of apprehension every time I right-click on one of those and tell my browser to open it in a new tab. What does it mean to open a web page in a new tab in a new tab? These are the harrowing threat situations I navigate among.</li><li>Following along after the yarrow and the orpine, now the larkspur is also poking tiny shoots out of my new planting bed! ❤️</li><li>Movie: The Booksellers (2019). Documentary about New York’s rare book sellers and collectors. Grade: good!</li><li>Interesting perspective in the movie: widespread Internet access has made collecting rare books far less popular, and it can now support far fewer professionals. Because everything’s become so easy to find. Collecting was mainly about the hunt. J. Briggs in her standard 1987 biography of Edith Nesbit could not find copies of several books of hers. Now they’re all in WorldCat and on bookselling web sites.</li><li>There’s a distinct subtype of the earliest group of these stone axes that seems to have no chronological significance. Small research finding just now: throughout the group’s lifetime, these axes with an oval-cross-section butt are the coastal variety. In the maritime society of the Late Bronze Age, travel and communication along the coast was much easier than inland and uphill onto the Småland highland.</li><li>Suddenly remember this plane crash that had a technical cause. And the pilot could be heard praying desperately on the cockpit recording while trying to get the controls to respond. But because he was praying in Arabic, they investigated it as a possible terrorist suicide. 🙄</li><li>First long bike ride of the year! One hour in the sunshine to Troll Stream Bakery. ❤️</li><li>A magpie pair are renovating the big nest in the park rowan outside our kitchen window.</li><li>The e-mail-shattered remnants of Swedish Mail can’t afford to pay mailmen to deliver mail to individual houses in our housing area any more. Part of the reason is that much of it is large mail-order packages these days. So they’ve just told us that they expect us to put our mailboxes in one spot at the boundary line of the area, like how it’s done in peripheral summer house areas.</li><li>Failed my haemoglobin count, am in no shape to donate blood. I’ve been hovering around the lower cutoff for 30 years. Back again in August!</li><li>Can’t wait to vote the catastrophic Kristersson government out of office. Imagine the party of big capital being dependent for every single decision on the party of racist small-town working men. Ineffectual, corrupt and anti-humanistic.</li><li>The game master in the Space Opera RPG (1980) is called the StarMaster.</li><li>There’s an Aircraft and Vehicle Rental table in Space Opera 1980. It includes a HoverLorry, a Heavy GravSled and a CargoSub. I ask you, does your modern sci-fi RPG of choice allow player characters to rent a cargo submarine? No? Then can it really be called a complete RPG?</li>
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2026-03-15 10:23:55 UTC

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Back On Hot Springs Island Again
I ran [six RPG sessions on Hot Springs Island](https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2024/09/29/thoughts-after-six-sessions-on-hot-springs-island/ ) with my home group in mid-2024. In recent weeks I’ve run three additional sessions at mini-conventions in Norrtälje and Vallentuna. And I’ve made a couple of observations.
You shouldn’t be afraid to let the NPCs leak a lot of lore to the PCs. If it’s at all reasonable that someone knows something and wants to talk, go ahead and let them talk about it. It’s really the only way to transmit some of the book’s unwieldy bush of stories to the players.
The random encounter tables are starting to look a lot less fun and random to me. They can be summarised with the words “You startle a large animal that tries to avoid you”.
Here’s why. The designer has underestimated the bell-curviness of 3D6. Such a die roll comes out at 9 to 12 at a 48% probability. 18 out of 25 hexes in this hex crawl are some kind of jungle. If you roll 9-12 there, you will only encounter six wildlife species, none of which hunts human-sized prey or otherwise wants to interact: deer equivalent, giant venomous centipede, boar, giant rat, giant bat, large venomous snake.
I’m going to house-rule this moving forward: in the jungle, 9-10 gets adjusted to 8, and 11-12 gets adjusted to 13.
But still, the convention players and I are having a lot of fun with the setting. Well worth [the PDF price](https://shop.swordfishislands.com/the-dark-of-hot-springs-island-digital/ )!
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2026-03-10 06:00:00 UTC

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March Pieces Of My Mind #1
Vårgärdssjön, Solsidan<li>I had a good idea for a business. Clients can hire me as a professional cynic. I’ll tell them in convincing authoritative tones that whatever they believe most sincerely in is actually pointless, banal, a misunderstanding or simply factually incorrect. I teach that whatever you may feel, you never break through to any deeper level of understanding. There is no enlightenment, no spiritual rebirth, no transcendence. Just particles in space.</li><li>This woman’s accent is so thick that I thought she said “You should die old” when she said “You should dial…”</li><li>The bronze statue of footballer Z. Ibrahimovic in Malmö was badly vandalised by people who a) loved his former club and were angry that he had left for Italy, b) hated immigrants. I don’t like it either. Because I don’t want spectator sports to be visible in the public space. I would prefer a statue of the footballer’s mom.</li><li>People’s perception of threat levels, famously, vary. And they co-vary with political affiliation. I’ve lived for 30 years in a heightened-crime multiethnic tenement suburb. My kid’s former classmate was convicted as accessory to an inept drug gang murder in the mall parking lot. Someone blew up a front door five houses over from mine. But unlike the fascists and conservatives, I’m not worried at all. Crime is a societal problem, but I feel safe.</li><li>The student musical we watched had a strange script. Started out establishing that it was about a literary rivalry between Henry Miller and the up and coming Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway then immediately got arrested for littering and sentenced to community service in a fish cannery. The rest of the play was almost entirely about the workers at that factory.</li><li>Saw a Playstation 5 for the first time at my daughter’s house. I didn’t even realise that it was a gaming console. That thing is the shape and size of a space heater. The computing power inside must be tremendous when they haven’t been able to miniaturise it further. In fact, it probably works as a space heater too!</li><li>I’m at the age where educated people “crown their careers”, as the Swedish expression goes, by becoming bosses of something or other. Archaeology-adjacent boss jobs tend to be wildly unattractive admin positions. Sure, they’re pretty well paid, but they don’t involve doing any archaeology. So it doesn’t bother me that my research background doesn’t qualify me for those jobs. My problem is that employers see me as over-qualified for jobs where you get to do anything fun.</li><li>Movie: Frank (2014). Hopeful young musician joins an oddball band, records an album with them in an Irish vacation home, travels with them to the SXSW festival. But are they brilliantly avantgarde? Or dysfunctional and mentally ill? Or both? Grade: OK.</li><li>Apparently “Dubai influencer” is a well-known media type. I had no idea. I would much prefer to live in a world where none of these existed.</li><li>Every spring I move snow and ice from the shady part of our little yard to the sunny part, in order to get rid of it faster.</li><li>Tech school daughter has been tasked with writing a marketing plan for an existing product. It’s a water bottle with a scented pad for your nose, to make you think that you’re drinking Coke or whatever. I just think this sounds like a complete joke.</li><li>Learned after years why the librarians make this half-hearted move to stop me from getting my books from the wait shelf to the lending counter. It’s because the names of other lenders are visible on paper slips in books. And after the Rushdie murder fatwah, that became a serious issue. I might harrass someone for borrowing a book about Medieval agricultural archaeology! 😄</li><li>The Writers’ Union is offering way more opportunities for professional engagement than archaeology does, 33 years into the latter career.</li><li>You’re a 62-y-o metal guitar virtuoso, you’re known for being irritable and having a very high opinion of yourself, and you book a gig in Moscow while Russia pursues a multi-year war of aggression in Europe. There are many ways to look at this. Perhaps the most apt one is that this is a senior Spinal Tap moment.</li><li>Pleased and surprised to learn that Chinese people are the ninth biggest immigrant nationality in our municipality.</li><li>Making phone calls to pitch a couple of talks to venues in towns around Lake Mälaren. One about 17th century travel writer Nils Mattsson Kiöping, one about Stockholm’s pre-1640 town plan.</li><li>Imagine a leader who said “Thank you big money donors for getting me elected. I have no ambition to be reelected four years from now. I am going to run this country entirely according to my party’s core ideology, and ignore you guys and your wishes. Fuck you all.”</li><li>Got a job offer from a night school, Sw. studieförbund. Unlikely to be many hours a month, but still.</li><li>Is everyone using their Microsoft Encarta CD-ROMs a lot these days?</li><li>I’ve been game-mastering several times a month for 5½ years now, and tonight was the first time a player character got killed. The players got into a gun fight in a heroically reckless manner, an opponent got lucky with his dice, and the critical hits table in Coriolis 2016 occasionally delivers lethal outcomes. Abidah, Near East space opera secret agent, we barely knew you!</li><li>“So now, you could spend the morning / Walking with me, quite amazed / As I am unwashed, and somewhat slightly dazed” D. Bowie</li><li>Someone is going to nuke something in the Near East, and insane US theocrats will be like “Well, that didn’t bring about the Second Coming, clearly we need to nuke some more”. 🙄</li><li>It makes me happy that my friend’s yappy dogs recognise me on sight and relax when they see who’s arriving. “Friendly laid-back human, offers scritches & cuddles but not food.”</li><li>Yesterday a non-member of the Swedish-Chinese community told me, a member since 26 years, sternly not to ask a Chinese person about their background because it was othering. 😄</li><li>Found a continuity error in Peake’s Titus Groan, ch. “Titus Is Christened”. Fuchsia’s aunts are speaking to her, with Clarice leading and Cora filling in asides like an echo. Then suddenly it’s the other way around in a way that does not look intentional.</li><li>Tried to read Ingvild Rishøi’s short stories, but they are not for me. I don’t enjoy reading about people who feel inadequate and act irrationally or have trouble deciding what to do at all, even if they are skillfully depicted. I get impatient with them, “Oh FFS, pull yourself together”.</li><li>First tulip spears are poking the tiniest bit out of the new planting bed. It will be an experiment in fallow deer repellent efficacy.</li><li>Friends of mine have moved to Linköping. There’s a huge unkempt two-storey rosebush on the front facade of their house. We’ve arranged for me to come down in two weeks and trim it into shape for them.</li><li>I practise Epicurean volunteering. I volunteer my time, but only for projects that offer community with other people and fun shared activities. There’s any number of much more important but onerous, embarrassing and boring charity activities I could volunteer for.</li><li>Here’s a random quotation from Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger (1977). In his 1976 book The Sirius Mystery, Robert K. G. Temple “… is not aware that NUit and ANUbis, two figures he specifically links with Sirius, are still very much alive among those magical lodges currently working the Aleister Crowley system of contacting Higher Intelligence.”</li>
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2026-02-25 12:31:46 UTC

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Been Charting A Career Course
It’s been a year since I lost my Polish research position to the profound economic impact of the Ukraine invasion, and I’m still on the dole. Yesterday I received another rejection for a uni job. It’s time to take stock and chart a new course. Rather than do it in my diary, I’ve decided to put it here, in the event that someone might be interested.
I’ve got a big fat research portfolio with strong bibliometry, a strong record of directing research-motivated fieldwork (an important distinction), a decent teaching record, a solid popular outreach record (hey, you should read my blog!), and a few years’ experience working part-time at a local museum. Here’s what I’ve learned in 13 months of applying for advertised positions.<li>I’ve only found four university positions advertised that I felt were realistic to apply for: in Poland, Norway, Germany and Denmark. I got one interview and no job.</li><li>The certificate of full professorial competence that I received in a Danish recruitment process in 2024 has, though it really cheered me up at the time, proved worthless in four countries. Including Denmark!</li><li>Both of my job applications with local museums led to interviews, but both museums then hired people with more experience than I of that kind of job. Sensible, in my opinion.</li><li>I have nothing of any perceived value to offer on the main normal labour market for archaeologists across Scandinavia, which has to do with roadworks. We call it contract archaeology – you may remember the deprecated term rescue excavations. If they hire someone who’s 53, then it’s someone who has already worked for years or decades in highway archaeology. (But the Ostlänken megaproject may make them desperate soon.)</li><li>Ten applications got me one interview with a County Archaeologist for an admin job. She, to my surprise, ended up hiring a young buddy of mine with roughly the same slim experience of contract archaeology as I have. But sure, his experience is much more recent, and he’s much more likely to stay on with them.</li><li>My teaching experience is worthless to high schools. Many many many applications tell me this, because this is how I fulfil the dole office’s demands each month.</li>
The conclusion I draw from this is that it would be useless to continue applying for jobs in academia, in contract archaeology, in county admin and in high school. To my surprise, I find that the field where I am the least unemployable is actually in local museums, jobs not involving field archaeology. But those are super rare and I can’t sit around waiting for the next ad.
So I figure my best chance of a source of income moving forward isn’t actually even on the labour market. I need to go back onto small grants, the private foundations that are happy to allocate €5,000 now and then to a productive scholar with a proven track record. Their problem is that they have to give people money before they know if those people will create anything worthwhile. Some of these foundations have known for 30 years that I’m a safe bet.

2026-02-21 06:00:00 UTC

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February Pieces Of My Mind #2
Sätra Yacht Club<li>I wonder what’s loose inside my laptop when it suddenly decides that yep, the network hardware and the track pad exist again! Seems so strange that these random pieces of the machine are glitching off and on.</li><li>“Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.” William Gibson 2014, The Peripheral, Ch. 81.</li><li>Parties always put way more names on their ballots than they are likely to get seats. Partly to replace representatives who quit during the years up to the next election. But mostly to show everyone that the party has a lot of dependable people to choose from. I was honoured to be asked yesterday if I’d have my name on the Left Party’s ballot in Nacka municipality. I told them I’d be happy to be in the padding section near the bottom if they need me. My third time!</li><li>I’ve been thinking backwards about American nature. “People in an alien environment among plants and animals we didn’t evolve along with.” I’m in fucking Sweden, Northern Europe. Try showing a birch, a Scots pine, a magpie, an elk to an early hominid. It will not nod in pleased recognition.</li><li>A local historical society asked me to give a talk at their ABM. It’s a two-hour drive. They offered one fifth of the Writers’ Union’s recommended minimum fee. I turned them down. Sure, I can do that kind of thing mostly pro bono while a salaried academic. To a job seeker though, it’s really just an insult.</li><li>There’s an uncomfortable tension in that Humanities departments need big grants to survive, but the individual scholar doesn’t need a big grant to produce work that gets accepted by top journals.</li><li>The bus driver was friendly and talkative. He was fond of combustion cars and did not believe any global warming is going on. “They taught us in middle school that CO2 is a cooling compound that forms extremely cold ice. How can that be a warming gas?” Everybody gets to vote.</li><li>Back in Växjö, where at long last I got my first teaching gig in 2012. Haven’t been back since my last lecture here in the autumn of 2014. At the time I would have been pleased to learn that the next time, I’d be here for Bronze Age finds data collection.</li><li>My head literally exploded in a figurative sense!!!</li><li>I’m thinking that if you really have to choose, it’s better to have lots of friends who want to spend time with you having fun, but not a single professional contact that offers you a job, than the other way around.</li><li>If you need a metric as to whether someone has an ear for language and reads a lot, ask them if they think automatic translation is good enough for fiction now. Anyone who answers yes has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.</li><li>It’s fascinating and instructive. When people saw that LLM chats appeared to understand instructions and always responded comprehensibly and with good grammar and spelling, they assumed that the replies would also be correct or at least well sourced. When in fact autocomplete has no such concept as correct or well sourced. This of course means that it’s useless to scholarship. I can’t use an LLM to interrogate a dataset, because I will have no idea if the results it reports are correct.</li><li>Listened to Snedtänkt. Filmmakers Alexandersson & De Geer discovered that in the 70s and 80s, the Swedish state film support bodies checked whether you made a TV series or feature film after they gave you a grant. But nobody was tasked with checking if your work had anything at all in common with the pitch you submitted when you applied for the money. They could do whatevs. 😄</li><li>Another one of my recurring thoughts. If you’re running a Swedish excavation unit, it is extremely unwise to hire a small finds specialist for your fieldwork reports. Because the person at the County Archaeologist’s office who signs off on your reports, letting you move on to the next project, knows nothing about finds, and can’t tell if that chapter is any good.</li><li>Our youngest is rehearsing a musical comedy while at tech school in Lund. The director and one of the actors are daughters of women who performed in the original staging of the piece in 1999. ❤️</li><li>Yay! My second fiction translation, Edith Nesbit’s ghost stories, got top marks from the Library Service! Just like my previous one of Lord Dunsany!</li><li>Movie: Amour Apocalypse (2025). Depressed, lonely, climate worrying man falls in love with the tech support lady at the firm that made his new daylight therapy lamp. Grade: good!</li><li>I was quite old when I realised that your electricity bill goes down if you thaw out frozen food in the fridge rather than on the kitchen counter or in a frying pan.</li><li>It’s a great relief to me that my younger daughter is doing a degree in industrial engineering and speaks three major world languages. She will always be employable whereever she ends up. Even in really scary refugee scenarios.</li><li>If you’re only going to listen to one single AC/DC track, then this is the one. “Whole Lotta Rosie”, live in Glasgow in 1978. Absolutely mindblowing!</li><li>Hey young peeps! I’m happy to report that the changes your lover undergoes over the decades are mainly visual. And you already know that it’s not mainly a visual pastime.</li><li>Nope, nothing about Northern Europe in the February issue of Antiquity. People keep expecting me to be interested in the archaeology of South America and New Zealand. It’s like telling a literature scholar who works with Latvian poetry that there’s a new interesting paper about Paraguay’s three most famous novelists.</li><li>When Robert Anton Wilson was dying and couldn’t afford hospice care, there was a charity collection. A lot of people sent $23.</li><li>Had some leftover fishy flour from frying fish. And some leftover sardines. Invented sardine pancake.</li><li>Learned another fascinating fact from an aside on the Common Descent podcast. Everywone knows that humans don’t just have a random, adequate sprinkling of teeth. Anatomically normal ones have 4 x 8 = 32 named tooth sockets. Get this: the thousands of little bristles on an insect are like that!</li><li>I love how my dusky-complexioned neighbours from southern parts get pink noses in the winter. ❤️</li><li>“Nannie Slagg entered, bearing in her arms the heir to the miles of rambling stone and mortar; to the Tower of Flints and the stagnant moat; to the angular mountains and the lime-green river where twelve years later he would be angling for the hideous fishes of his inheritance.” M. Peake 1946, Titus Groan, Ch. A Gold Ring</li><li>Democratisation is a shaky concept these days in art and science. It’s when you can afford an eight-channel recording device and volunteer on a bird-ringing project. It’s not when you can prompt the plagiarism server for a picture and question vaccines or climatology in a Facebook group.</li><li>Prior to the 1970s, games-master meant gym teacher in UK English.</li><li>Yay! The Writers’ Union just booked me to give a talk to the members about my recent work co-authored with A. Wramler on what the neighborhood where the Union’s HQ is located looked like before the current town plan was laid out in c. 1640.</li><li>One lifelong academic priority of mine has been to mock Humanities scholars who exaggerate the political importance of their chosen fields. They’re often Bourdieu fans. Fascist regimes enable successful fascist scholars in our obscure disciplines. Not the other way around. We are the tail, not the dog.</li><li>Received proofs of the big paper on animal art that I spent most of last academic year on. With Luciano Pezzoli’s amazing illustrations! This is in Praehistorische Zeitschrift. I think it has the potential to be used a lot moving forward.</li><li>Found the hyphenation “anal-ogous”. It’s a German journal…</li><li>Tech school daughter invited us to a formal student dinner after her musical theatre performance. Three-courses. Starts half an hour before midnight. “Thanks but HELL NO” was my reply. I would just find a quiet corner right away and fall asleep. 😄</li><li>Interesting ethical conundrum. Is it OK to buy decontextualised Scandinavian-made Viking Period coins online and write scholarly journal notes about them? The editors of the very solidly established journal Nordisk Numismatisk Unions Medlemsblad think it’s OK. I’m not so sure. When I edited a journal, my policy was to not publish anything where the author had bought his source material.</li><li>My oldest played me her new 5-minute audiodrama about cooking a meal for your casual hookup date! ❤️❤️❤️</li><li>Oh Mike Oldfield, you brilliant nerd. On “To France” he moves one note of the synth bass to the right-hand channel with regular intervals.</li><li>Musical idea: record a cover of Kraftwerk’s long song “Autobahn”, add lyrics about bird conservation projects, call it “Audubon”.</li><li>When you’re dealing with digital images, dpi (Dots Per Inch) is a completely meaningless metric. Because you can imagine that your digital 500 by 500 pixel image is an inch wide, or a mile wide. It’s still exactly 500 by 500 pixels. When talking about image file resolution for printing purposes, the number you need is never dpi. It’s width in pixels.</li><li>Weather forecast suggests that a week from now, Fisksätra will get at least three days of above-zero temperatures and rain. Might be the start of meteorological spring, though on average it starts around 7 March here.</li><li>It’s -8°C here, but the sun is up early again. And there’s this bird chirping in our yard, a little song that sounds a lot like this guy / gal expects spring soon. ❤️</li><li>Written a pitch letter to publishing houses for a popular book on Swedish Prehistory & Middle Ages. Feeling good about what I have to offer.</li>
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2026-02-19 11:59:58 UTC

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Academic Hiring Is An Extreme Buyer’s Market
Academic hiring is an extreme buyer’s market, where employers can afford to offend people really badly at their convenience.
I recently had a good experience in a Norwegian recruitment process that hasn’t been finalised yet. But let me tell you about my dialogue with a university in another country.
*Uni N.N.:* Hello world, here’s an opening for a senior academic in South Scandy archaeology, no particular speciality. Feel free to apply!
*Me:* Thanks, here’s my application that I spent several days writing!
*Uni N.N. after a few months:* No thanks, you’re not on the shortlist. Goodbye.
*Me:* I’ve published research for 30 years and worked at six universities, and you treat my application exactly like you would if I had worked at full-time at McDonalds for all this time? I think you should give me a transparent and meritocratic explanation for why I’m not on the shortlist.
*Uni N.N.:* No, sorry, we got too many applications, we haven’t got time to evaluate them all properly.
*Me:* OK, so you haven’t got time to tell me why I did not get an interview. Instead, please then tell me the criteria that you used for the shortlist, the ones you didn’t put in your highly unspecific job ad. Were you actually looking for some chronological, regional, methodological speciality?
*Uni N.N.:* Sorry, not going to tell you. Goodbye.

2026-02-10 06:00:00 UTC

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February Pieces Of My Mind #1
<li>Had to abandon the Proton online word processor and spreadsheet after a long honest try. They’re just so bad.</li><li>Big museums used to collect information on archaeological finds in other hands, both private and public. Sometimes even copies of objects, and I don’t mean sculpture that could be exhibited as “art”. (There’s no such thing as art. There’s only archaeological finds that haven’t entered the ground yet.) Today I’m looking through old card files on Bronze Age finds in other hands. I wonder when the decision was made to stop updating them.</li><li>In Sweden, public bodies can pay someone to make a colourful painting for them. If it’s labelled as “art”, then it’s more expensive and the buyer is legally prohibited from making any demands on what the painting should depict. If the same painting is labelled as “decoration”, it’s cheaper and you can instruct the painter in detail. But public bodies are required to buy “art”. I’m an archaeologist. I work with wordless things. I think this is a ridiculous distinction.</li><li>Thinking about the pathetic Pickup Artist movement where insecure men try to manipulate women into one-night stands. And I realise that I’m not the right person to judge these clowns. Because, and I’m saying this in the most conceited tone possible, women have made it quite clear to me ever since I was 15 that they kind of like me. Why would I try to manipulate them? I never needed a PUA manual.</li><li>Blue sky and a bit of daylight left at 16:30! Stockholm has survived another dark season!</li><li>What if they achieve artificial intelligence, it’s a clear thing, only it’s low artificial intelligence, like a normal three-year-old human. You can talk to it, it asks endless questions, but it’s never going to be smart enough to be useful, certainly not to build better versions of itself and spark the Rapture of the Nerds.</li><li>I still practice something I learned from a PC Mag column around 1990: If it fits, put your entire email message in the subject line, and leave the letter space empty. This cannot be replaced with a chat service, because they don’t have a useful paper trail and archiving system.</li><li>Had tea with a 60ish journalist who told me she’s writing a book about climate emergency protestors. Interested in organic farming. She was intrigued to hear about the Society of Creative Anachronism, about the Tolkien Society. Seemed completely divorced from nerd culture. Then she told me she’d spent years of her rural youth in Västergötland playing AD&D!</li><li>It was astonishing to me to learn that reading a piece of writing out loud from the page in a comprehensible and engaging way is a skill. And it’s a skill that some extremely intelligent and accomplished people lack. And they don’t know that they lack it.</li><li>Chuckling a little discouragedly to myself. Good news: younger colleagues and friends of mine that I’ve coached are getting good steady jobs not in academia. Bad news: I applied for those same jobs. Because the only jobs I have really solid qualifications for are as a university professor or a humanities journal editor. And those jobs are exceedingly rare. But other employers who see my CV assume that I’ll be getting one of those jobs soon. As if.</li><li>A Danish survey documents that the country has 484 public statues of historically important men, and 43 of historically important women. Most public statues of women in Denmark depict anonymous nudes. The historically important men are almost entirely fully clad.</li><li>Movie: The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988). Rock documentary, long interviews with the famous and never to be famous in the L.A. hair metal scene in 1987-88. Grade: good!</li><li>Great line about alcoholism from Alice Cooper in the documentary. From memory, not the exact wording: “Puking blood is all well and good here on stage, but it’s not much fun when you have to do it at a Holiday Inn.”</li><li>You no longer need a publisher to get your book designed, printed and bound. The really important jobs a publishing house still does these days are marketing and distribution. Without that, a self-published author just owns a very large number of identical books that will probably stay in their spare room, where nobody knows about them, until someone throws them out.</li><li>Had tea and a chat with my first wife today. We lived together for six years, I moved out in ’98. She showed me a really good pencil drawing of a tulip. Still buys lapsang souchong.</li><li>Doodle, in the free version, recently cut down from 20 to 10 dates per poll. I have now tried xoyondo.com and found it to be even better than Doodle used to be. And free.</li><li>Skilled workers from the Baltic States are great. Very happy to have them in Sweden. But the plumbers leave one particular signature: they swap the hot and cold water at the wash stand.</li><li>Freemasons have often been the subject of the same conspiracy theories and blood libel as Jewish people. During our guided tour of the Swedish Masons’ Stockholm HQ, our guide pointed out that it was easy to accuse the Masons of killing children. Because they funded a lot of orphanages, where mortality was always high regardless of who paid the rent. So yes, children who were in a sense in the care of Freemasons did actually die. Though not as part of midnight rituals.</li><li>Grammatical confession: when someone asks to be called “them”, I just can’t do it in speech. Not because of any gender ID hostility, but because it hurts my grammar hardware too much. “Them” is plural to me. I default to using their name rather than any pronoun at all.</li><li>They took down the whole backlog of the CIA World Factbook from the web. One of the more cogent arguments against universal suffrage around 1900 was that the unwashed masses were severely ignorant, they would elect crooks and morons, and incompetent leadership is how powerful states fall into decline. It’s a sad spectacle, and it’s dangerous to us in Sweden too. “I’ll try to stay serene and calm / When Alabama’s got the bomb.” /Tom Lehrer</li><li>One of my main assumptions here in life is that if you have a really strong sense that something means something important, you’re almost certainly wrong. Religion? Impossible, there are tens of thousands of conflicting ones. Hallucinogenic drugs? No, famously you’ll come off your trip with an intense feeling of having learned something significant, but all you can ever explain to others is “You should do drugs too, man”. Your quest for meaning is doomed to begin with. Just quit.</li><li>Yay! Our new neighbour has two stringy-haired sausage dogs!</li><li>I’m working on three papers in parallel now. The big one is about Late Bronze Age stone (!) axes. Then there’s a medium one about the Äversta bog sacrificial site from c AD 200 to 1000. And finally a note about the Viking Period and Medieval location of Erstavik Manor, of whose old land my wife and I own just enough for a small house.</li><li>A new business model for book shops is doing well in Tokyo, where the old one is dying out. I rent the shop space and keep the shop. Then I sub-let shelf space in 40-centimetre chunks for €30-60 per month to self published authors, small publishers, associations, celebrities. And I pocket 5% of their sales.</li><li>I spent two happy hours peeling garlic, chopping onions and chatting to kind and friendly people with idealistic views. Prepping for the punk soup kitchen.</li><li>Did you know that technocracy means government by educated specialists? It has nothing to do with tech bros.</li><li>LinkedIn just sent me a tailored job-ad recommendation. A professorship, no less! 1. It’s a professorship of radiology. I’m not confident that I would be able to fake senior academic knowledge in this completely unknown field. 2. It’s offered via “Quik Hire Staffing” 😄</li><li>Busing tables and washing dishes at the punk lunch place was exactly what I needed in my state of unnecessariness. Lots of friendly peeps!</li><li>Sunny today, got some male birds into an amorous & territorial mood. Heard both the great tits’ Thaw Song and the woodpeckers’ brisk drum solos. ❤️</li><li>But we’ve still got a solid slab of winter weather ahead. For the next ten days, the forecast promises temperatures between -11 and -2°C, and at least two days of heavy snowfall. Reassuring that Swedish winter is more than just a memory.</li><li>The first wave of Swedish punk rock started in 1978. The people who reach retirement age in 2026 turned 19 in 1978. We are in the era of punk retirement. But Swedish recent retirees have excellent health on average. I hope they form new punk bands now that they have time.</li><li>Here’s a song title for free if anyone needs one. BUT I’M OLD ENOUGH TO BE YOUR TEENAGE FATHER</li><li>Sending a copy of my 2015 book on wetland deposition as a gift to an English PhD student. “For N.N., herewith invoking the Lady of the Lake’s constant support in a long and happy research career”.</li><li>My youngest is playing Anaïs Nin in a re-staging of a 1999 amateur musical comedy about Ernest Hemingway! ❤️</li><li>Chinawoman: “Maybe you would like some potatoes as a vegetable along with this chicken dish and the obvious rice”. Her Germanic husband: “Potatoes = rice”.</li>
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2026-02-03 12:02:34 UTC

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No Rotary, I’m Someone Who Needs Your Charity
Rotary International is a major charitable organisation that raises funds, largely from its own members, for some excellent causes. Notably PolioPlus, a >40-year effort to immunise children worldwide.
But in its everyday activities, a local Rotary club is primarily a social forum for businesspeople and educated professionals. They have monthly meetings, eat lunch together and listen to a talk.
Over the decades, now and then I’ve been asked to provide these talks. And I’ve given them one or two. But today when an old lady called, I turned Rotary down. Because they never pay speakers. Their operational model is that volunteer speakers make the monthly club meetings attractive to members, and this then motivates the members to donate to PolioPlus.
I wondered about this already back when I was precariously funded with small grants. And now that I’ve been on the dole for nine months, it’s really jarring to me.
Hey Rotary, listen. I already donate to several charities despite being unemployed and never having had much money. You are an association of mostly quite affluent people. Why are you keeping your support of charity hostage, subject to the condition that possibly quite poor people show up to your meetings and entertain you for free?
If I speak at your meeting, I suspect that what I’m actually mainly supporting is the cohesion of your local club as a recommendation-only social forum for retired businesspeople. And honestly, the continued availability of such a forum is not any concern of mine. If the National Pensioners’ Organisation calls me, I’ll be right there and entertain them. They may not be trying to eradicate polio, but they let anybody join regardless of recommendations.
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2026-01-30 06:00:00 UTC

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January Pieces Of My Mind #3The Indebetou family ran a starch mill at this inlet on Skogsö from 1661 until 1719 when the Russian navy burned it down<li>I think analytical machine learning is great. Extremely useful! I’d be super interested in artificial intelligence too if any came online. But generative machine learning applications, such as LLMs and image generators, are not intelligent. It’s a marketing scam.</li><li>Big global hit songs in the 80s had some bizarre lyrics. In ’83 Michael Jackson vehemently denied the paternity of one Billie Jean’s baby, going so far as to tell the world that he didn’t even love her. Which was hardly relevant. In ’86 Madonna made it known that she was not having an abortion on “Papa Don’t Preach”, though in fact she didn’t have her first child until ten years later at age 38.</li><li>Only a bit more than six weeks left until Stockholm can expect meteorological spring.</li><li>It’s hard to understand why musical skill, songwriting skill, has such a low market value. Maybe it’s because neither is very rare. But to me it’s magic.</li><li>YAY! Younger daughter auditioned for Boel-spexet last week, an all-women student amateur musical in Lund, and she got a big part! When I was her age I wrote, acted and sang in amateur musicals in the Stockholm Tolkien Society. ❤️</li><li>People generally don’t realise that a museum is a major storage and archive that offers to find and show the public and scholars any given object in its care, with provenance, century after century. 70 years ago, Evert Baudou looked at 90 stone axes in the Swedish History Museum. This week I got to handle every single one again. A few of them have been in that collection for 200 years by now. ❤️</li><li>It has been determined that the 8-minute groovy psychedelic stoner rock song from 2008 that you should listen to today is “Welcome to the Void” by The Kings of Frog Island.</li><li>Today we’re out of the year’s darkest 1/6 in the northern hemisphere, the two months centered on 21 December. 👍️</li><li>Imagine telling someone in 1950 that train travel across Europe will one day be the expensive alternative chosen by well-off people with environmentalist opinions, while unskilled workers will only be able to afford air tickets, and arrive in a fraction of the time.</li><li>Hey New York and California, if you would just secede, then we can talk. Otherwise, fuck no. /Europe and Canada</li><li>I can’t quite see why it should be cold and dark and January, when it could be warm and sunny and July. This is the confusion at the heart of the Swedish national character.</li><li>Read something on a forum that I’ve kind of known but never thought clearly about. For many or most RPGs you get vastly different ideas about what the game is really about if you read a) the core rulebook and worldbook, b) the published scenarios. E.g. Ashen Stars and Coriolis, whose rulebooks emphasise spaceship building and space battle, but the scenarios barely mention it. Or the many varied PC group concepts in Coriolis, most of which are incompatible w published scenarios.</li><li>I want to opt out of stupid people. There’s an annual fascist youth rally in Italy, named for the main character in Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story. Haven’t read it? Let’s just say that it’s… not in line with fascism. 🙄</li><li>Regional museum tells me “Sorry, no, due to a storage move you can’t look at our fifty stone axes.” This is of course emotionally frustrating for me, because I can’t finish my project without those axes. It’s a quarter of the material. But thinking about it, I realise that it makes no practical difference to anyone whether I ever finish this project. Not even to me.</li><li>Even if we had no fossils of prehistoric humans, it would be obvious from the DNA where our species originated. Almost all the genetic variability in Homo sapiens is between populations in Africa south of the desert. Because of ample time to diversify. This means that if there’s a population that’s genetically less intelligent, then it can’t be “Africans”. They’re way, way too diverse. It’s quite possible for “Europeans” though, who are basically a monoclone in comparison.</li><li>One way to think about it is this: it’s impossible to say anything that’s true about French wine in general, because there are too many different vintages. But it’s possible to speak about Swedish wine in aggregate, because there’s only like two of them. (I hear they should be avoided.)</li><li>Had a sudden longing to give a stringy-haired dachshund some good pats and scritches. I grew up around those little guys. I like a dog with an even temper and a great long snout. ❤️</li><li>Less well known traits of gen-Xers: because we were teens in the 80s, we instantly identify any music with a soprano saxophone as cheesy and lame.</li><li>Remember when musician Wyclef Jean, unbidden, offered to serve as president of Haiti? I’m still waiting for my own exactly right moment to make that offer.</li><li>Unless someone cleans the sites up, one day, tens of thousands of years in the future, someone will be studying the Apollo Project’s used-diaper dumps on the Moon as a source of environmental data on late 1900s Earth.</li><li>Thinking contemptuous thoughts about a certain voter demographic, and optimistic thoughts about kicking out the fascist-controlled Swedish government in September.</li><li>Astonished to learn that the Atlantic sturgeon Acipenser oxyrinchus established itself in Northern European streams and along the coasts only 6000 years ago. On an evolutionary time scale, that’s NOW, which means that the sturgeon is an invasive species. It was driven regionally extinct in Sweden 100 years ago, yet now they’re restoring the population!? Sturgeon = kudzu! I guess the distinction is that of nature vs. culture.</li><li>One of the gamemastering policies I’ve developed over the past 5½ years is this: It’s never too late to let the group know that you can attend a sesh. (That you can’t is quite another story.) Another policy of mine is that random friends and family members of the group regulars can almost always be given a character and join in for the sesh.</li><li>Maybe I should write a paper for a genre literature studies journal on the basis of my lecture about mead halls in Early Germanic literature, in Tolkien and in the archaeologists’ trenches. That might actually find some readers.</li><li>The early- to mid-20th century fantasy genre was created and read by people who were intimately familiar with Victorian historical fiction and travel writing. Later, it has been written and read by people who often have no idea of these antecedents, and can’t recognise its tropes and conventions.</li><li>Came home listening to Gong on headphones, took them off, found that my wife was listening to some interesting weird music too. There was this simple monophonic piano melody mixed really loud over a choir that was singing semi-dissonant Modernist harmonies way, way back in the mix with a lot of reverb. Experimental and, yes, interesting. Turned out that it’s what the altos in my wife’s choir get by email in order to learn their part in the piece heard way back in the mix.</li><li>Often when I read complicated RPG rules I think to myself, “There is no way that this is actually playable at the gaming table. This is aspirational rules design. People will just forget to use most of this, because there’s nothing that triggers an RPG rule beyond what people remember.”</li><li>Le Monde has a long article about the drowning of three French citizens when a tourist boat got overturned off the coast of Oman. These deaths are a serious matter. But I’m thinking, what if Le Monde ran one long article for every three people who drown in the Mediterranean.</li><li>Dying on the Mediterranean when a boat overturns on Europe’s doorstep should be seen as analogous to dying from hunger strike when in state custody.</li><li>Walked a friendly old lady back to the nearby dementia home.</li><li>Someone should design the Ostsiedlung Fantasy RPG, where the player characters are Slavs and Germans in AD 1200, communicating with folkloric beings and Slavic gods east of the Oder. Simultaneous publication in Polish and German, same text. Introduction written by the lead singer of Behemoth.</li><li>Maailman: “the world’s” in Finnish. Email: “enamel” in German.</li><li>We all know about the huge 1960s mythology, the 1970s mythology, the 1980s mythology. But I find it hard to conceive that anyone out there is looking back at the 2000s or 2010s and saying “Oh man, those were heady times, just epic is all I can say, you really had to be there to understand”.</li><li>One of the more bizarre episodes during my time on the board of the Swedish Skeptics Society was in 2012 when someone calculated my horoscope and published it with some rather hostile commentary. “Rundkvist’s horoscope is a … nightmare. … Not many are fortunate enough to grow out of this constipation between oral Taurus and anal Scorpio. … an almost identical horoscope … is a severely gender-disordered lesbian with an unhappy family history involving incest.”</li><li>Walked past the gas station with my skis yesterday. Realised that it’s been a long time since the gas price on the big glowing sign outside meant anything to me. I haven’t owned a car in years, and my wife’s got an electric. The rural / small-town fascist voters have it right. Us suburbanites around the big cities really do not share their concerns. But I’d be happy to vote to reinstate and increase the EV subsidy.</li><li>Autofiction is one of the strongest trends in contemporary literature. It’s kind of the reality TV of books. I haven’t read any. I’ve never cared about contemporary mainstream literature. Last year the median age of the books I read was 26 years. But I did recently buy Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography from 1563. It’s highly self-congratulatory and he possibly lies a lot in it.</li>
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2026-01-12 06:00:00 UTC

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Non-victims of a Serial Murder ConfessorLake Appojaure /ÁhppojávrreLong-term active serial killers are extremely rare. A country of ten million is exceedingly unlikely to suffer the crimes of one in any given quarter century. So Thomas Quick was a very big deal in Sweden. From 1994 to 2001, he was convicted of eight murders, and he confessed to nine additional ones that he was never tried for.
Because Thomas Quick never actually killed anyone. He was a gay junkie with sexual problems, in forced psychiatric custody from 1991 for hostage-taking and robbery. When he entered treatment by one of that period’s characteristic repressed-memories therapists, he came up with a way to get lots of attention and truckloads of primo meds. All he had to do was go to the library and read up on unsolved murder cases, then “remember” committing the murders. He was eventually acquitted in all eight cases.
But for seven years, Swedish news were full of the most awful details about the murders, reported from the trials. We had no idea that it was actually horror fiction created by someone on a lot of benzodiazepines. So who did murder those seventeen people? And how did it happen, now that we know that Quick’s versions were made up? I had the impulse to check a few of the more prominent cases. And in the middle of all the pain and sorrow involved, I think what actually happened is kind of a relief in comparison. There’s even room for a wry laugh here.
In July of 1984 two Dutch hikers, Mr. & Mrs. Stegehuis, were knifed to death with extreme overkill inside their tent at a scenic mountain lake. Reading about this in the Quick era from 1994 onward, Swedes lived with a feeling that anyone inside a tent can get randomly murdered by itinerant maniacs even in a complete wilderness. Well, apparently not.
Nearby on that evening, a group of local men were also having a nice hike. There was a drunken disagreement, and one of them, a bodybuilder notorious for his violent tendencies, angrily left the camp. He later came back covered in blood and carrying a bloody knife, claiming to have butchered a reindeer. None of the men reported anything. Years later, the bodybuilder was in jail and confessed to a fellow inmate that he had been so angry and confused that night that, when he blundered back to teach his buddies a lesson, he had gotten lost and attacked the wrong tent. Alcohol and steroids will do that to you. He killed himself in 1996.
In July of 1988, nine-y-o Therese went missing in Drammen, Norway. Quick spun a really juicy tale about what he’d done to her. It led to a farcical forensics investigation where the police found a single fragment of some white material, a highly qualified osteologist pronounced it to be part of a young human’s lower arm, and later it turned out to be a piece of plastic laminate countertop. Therese has never been found, dead or alive. Any archaeologist could have told the police that the bones of a nine-y-o do not disintegrate in a few years, particularly not if the body is cremated, as Quick claimed he had done.
But the girl’s parentage was a little uncertain. One man who may have thought he was her father was a Pakistani neighbour and former partner of her mother’s. It is quite possible that Therese is currently a middle-aged Muslim farmer’s wife in a village somewhere along the River Indus. Norwegian police have been there to look for her, unsuccessfully.
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2025-04-03 07:05:30 UTC

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20 Years With Podcasts
Today’s my 20th anniversary as a podcast listener. I didn’t listen much to the radio before that, so I’ve heard way more podcast hours than radio hours by now. The reason that I switched distribution channels and started listening more was of course the infinitely greater selection of specialised topics. I listen to podcasts while cycling, riding public transport, driving, and doing housework. That’s a lot of time each week.
The first podcasts I heard back on that April day in 2005 were interviews with Cory Doctorow and Xeni Jardin of *Boingboing*. Soon two of my favourite shows were the scifi short-fiction podcast [*Escape Pod*](https://escapepod.org/ ) and the *[R.U. Sirius Show](https://rusiriusradio.com/ )*.* In March 2008 [I wrote](https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2008/03/07/great-science-fiction-podcast/ ) that *Escape Pod’s* show host Serah Eley was “a fixture in my life, the way Oprah wouldn’t be even if I watched TV”. I still listen to the surf rock band Daikaiju because of that podcast. Other favourites of mine [at the time](https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/lets-find-some-good-podcasts/ ) were *[Podcastle](https://podcastle.org/ )*, *[Digital Planet](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002w6r2/episodes/downloads )*,* *[Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe](https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ )* and *[Skepticality](https://www.skepticality.com/ )*.*
In [December 2013](https://aardvarchaeology.wordpress.com/2013/12/23/five-good-podcasts/ ) my favourites included *[The Drabblecast](https://www.drabblecast.org/ )*, *[Planetary Radio](https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio )*, *[Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff](https://www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com/ )*, *[Skeptics With a K](https://www.merseysideskeptics.org.uk/podcasts/skeptics-with-a-k )* and *[The H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast](https://www.hppodcraft.com/ )*.* Half a year later *[The Geologic Podcast](http://geologicpodcast.com/ )* was also on the list.
Today I subscribe to 14 active podcasts that aren’t also available on Swedish radio. My current favourites reflect my shift of interests during the 2010s from the pro-science skeptical movement (which I still sympathise with) to tabletop gaming (which I practice intensively).<li><a href="https://www.kenandrobintalkaboutstuff.com/">Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff</a> — Kenneth Hite and Robin Laws wax eloquent and eclectic on RPGs, fiction, history, occultism, books, movies, and the list just goes on.</li><li><a href="https://thegrognardfiles.com/">The Grognard Files</a> — Dirk and Blythy with guests talk about RPGs old and new.</li><li><a href="https://poddtoppen.se/podcast/606301449/juridikpodden">Juridikpodden</a> — two Stockholm University Law scholars talk about legal news.</li><li><a href="https://www.ludonarrativedissidents.com/">Ludonarrative Dissidents</a> — game designers Payton, Stolze and Wallis analyse RPGs old and new.</li><li><a href="https://commondescentpodcast.com/">Common Descent</a> — David & Will talk about fossil animals.</li>
Dear Reader, what are some of your favourite podcasts?
** In the above, asterisks mark defunct shows and I link to their episode archives.*
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2024-09-29 18:23:12 UTC

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Thoughts After Six Sessions On Hot Springs Island
In 2018 the Gold Ennie Award for best role-playing game adventure went to a 2017 book titled *The Dark of Hot Springs Island*. The title refers to this being the dark information about the island, intended only for the Game Master. The authors are Jacob Hurst, Evan Peterson and Donnie Garcia. There is also a companion book intended for players, the *Field Guide to Hot Springs Island*, which I haven’t read.
DHSI is set in a fabulous fantasy world where magic works and the technology is High Medieval, on a volcanic island in the tropics where elemental spirits are common. It is system agnostic: the GM chooses what rules set to use. Most encounters with the island’s inhabitants are randomised with 3d6: the normal, expected ones for each habitat occur on 9-12, while the really odd ones only show up if you roll the rare extremes of 3 or 18. This is a hex-crawl sandbox setting. The map of the island, which is the size of Brač in Croatia or 1/8 of main-island Gotland in Sweden, is divided into 25 hexagons. There are simple rules for how much time it takes to investigate one of them.
Using a Swedish 1985 edition of Basic Role-Playing, I ran the module in six 3-4-hour sessions with median five players. I had them swim ashore after a shipwreck in the quiet hex 9 on the island’s west coast, and they spent seven active in-game days on the island. Their main motivation was to find their elderly employer, this world’s equivalent of Carolus Linnaeus, who had organised the expedition. The only combat I recall was against a carnivorous bush and a big insect. Also they killed several boars for food by levitating them with magic and sticking them with improvised bamboo spears. Mainly they investigated ruins and talked to various fabulous beings. We all had fun!
But a lot of the fun was the kind where you laugh in disbelief at utter weirdness. DHSI bears every sign of having been written by tittering stoners. There are drug references on almost every page. The plentiful illustrations by Gabriel Hernandez feature a lot of boobs and skulls. There are enormous amounts of very odd psychedelic lore that the players mostly have no way of learning. Three examples only.<li>Hex 14 seems to exist entirely because someone had written a long story about a woman who turned into a giant crab, and wanted to put it in the book.</li><li>In hex 25 the underwater HQ of the sea nymphs is mapped and described in detail, despite the fact that very few player characters have any way of visiting it, or any reason to. It is 15 metres below sea level.</li><li>There are three pages detailing the musical career and love life of the Beyoncé-like head sea nymph.</li>
The biggest strength of the module in my opinion is that every main character and faction on the island is given a clearly stated agenda, detailing what they want, what they don’t want, and how they relate to each other. Note however that several of the factions are extremely unlikely to ever show up on the player’s radar.
All in all I think that after over 20 hours of fun play for six people, at [$10 for the PDF](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/215340/the-dark-of-hot-springs-island ) *The Dark of Hot Springs Island* is excellent value for money and highly recommended. But you need to enjoy bizarre psychedelic shit. This is very much not solemn high fantasy. Let me leave you with a summary of the island’s early history as an example.
*
*An ancient race of snake people bred a mushroom tree whose pollen inadvertently made them all so stoned that their civilization collapsed.*
*Then elves immigrated to the island, and they became addicted to the berries of a fibre crop plant that the snake people had created. Soon all the elves died from over-dosing on the drug berries, except those with magical powers. Much later, a magical disaster occured that killed all the elves, except for those who were stoned on berries at that moment. These instead turned into mindless orange blobs that still crawl around the island thousands of years later, looking for drug berries. The book contains two pages of rules for how the player characters can use the drug berries and what entertaining side effects they can cause.*
*Since the time of the elves, there is also a species of otherworldly parasitic spider on the island. It gives people the ability to make astral journeys, but also makes them completely disfigured and barely able to move.*
#9
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2009-05-26 15:04:30 UTC

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Nose Balloon
*[More blog entries about [health](http://www.technorati.com/tags/health ), [ears](http://www.technorati.com/tags/ears ), [cold](http://www.technorati.com/tags/cold ); [hÃ¤lsa](http://bloggar.se/om/h%E4lsa ), [Ã¶ron](http://bloggar.se/om/%F6ron ), [fÃ¶rkylning](http://bloggar.se/om/f%F6rkylning ).]*
When she has a cold, my 5-y-o daughter often suffers temporary hearing loss. Her ears don’t get infected, there’s no pain or fever — she just can’t hear very well, sometimes for weeks. The reason is that the lining of her eustachian tubes becomes swollen, obstructing them, and then fluid leaks out of the walls of the middle ear, flooding it and putting a damper on her audio. These days Swedish doctors try to avoid putting drainage pipes through kids’ ear drums. Instead the excellent Dr. Claes Wibom (who’s now treating the fourth generation of my family) recommended that I buy my daughter a nose balloon.
Nose balloon. It’s a balloon fitted with a spherical nozzle so you can inflate it with your nostrils. A beautifully simple treatment.
The balloon helps a kid put air pressure on their eustachian tubes from the pharynx, which opens them and helps keep the middle ear drained. Us grownups do the same thing easily by just closing our eyes, holding our noses and “pushing”, like on air trips or while driving in mountains or scuba diving. But try to explain that push to a little kid!
My daughter uses the balloon with great gusto mornings and nights, and often she comments on the wind she then hears blowing inside her ears. That’s when an obstructed tube opens and admits air into her middle ear.
(Now, don’t confuse this with ear candles. That’s just woo.)
http://www.reddit.com/button.js?t=1http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js

2007-03-30 09:05:05 UTC

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Genuine Advantage, My Ass
In recent years, I’ve bought three copies of a useful piece of software as part of package deals on computers. The software licences include free on-line upgrades, and hardly a week goes by without an offer of some tweak or patch to improve the workings of things. I gratefully partake.
I’ve been a loyal customer of this software company for almost 20 years. But when I heard what the [newest version](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista#Criticism ) of their product is like, I began considering alternatives. And in the past few days, I have received offensive messages from them that made up my mind real quick.
Dear Reader, have you heard of [Microsoft Windows Genuine Advantage](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advantage )? It’s offered to users of Windows XP as a free upgrade. This “genuinely advantageous” little program’s sole purpose is to check if the machine it’s installed on is running pirated Microsoft programs. Yet it is offered to me as if it were something I might find useful. This is exactly like if you have shopped at the same grocery store for decades, and then one day the proprietor starts frisking you for stolen goods every time you leave the store — “for your own safety’s sake”.
Linux, baby, here I come! I know there’s going to be a learning hurdle, but it’ll be worth it to get an operating system that puts my computing power to work for me, not for various large American corporations including the music and movie industry. And not getting called a thief every time I start a machine of mine will be a genuine advantage.*
*