Month: August 2015

Dún Aonghasa

Erik
Aerial view of Dún Aonghasa. Photograph by Ronan Mac Giollopharaic
Aerial view of Dún Aonghasa, photograph by Ronan Mac Giollopharaic via Wikimedia

While doing some research on northern European hillforts recently, I found myself looking at some pictures of Dún Aonghasa (also known as Dun Aengus). It’s an impressive site. The fort is a series of concentric half-rings backing up onto 100-meter cliffs on the island on Inishmore off the western coast of Ireland. The earliest construction on the site has been dated to around 1100 BCE. Later additions were made around 500 BCE. It is one of the largest well-preserved examples of a type of structure that was built throughout northern and western Europe, from Spain to Sweden, in the prehistoric era.

The "cheveaux de frise," a barrier of jagged stones set up to slow down attackers. Photograph by Herbert Ortner
The “cheveaux de frise,” a barrier of jagged stones set up to slow down attackers, photograph by Herbert Ortner via Wikimedia

There has been disagreement in the scholarship about the function of Dún Aonghasa and similar forts. While often identified as fortified settlements, some have suggested that they were actually sites of religious ritual. It has to be said that if Dún Aonghasa and sites like it were religious sanctuaries, they were amazingly well-defended ones. I think it is more likely that sites that were originally built for defense were centuries later repurposed as ceremonial sites, much like how medieval castles built for defense have centuries later become museums and tourist attractions.

The walls of Dún Aonghasa and the cliffs of Inishmore. Photograph by Jal74
The walls of Dún Aonghasa and the cliffs of Inishmore, photograph by Jal74 via Wikimedia

It may be hard to believe that such an enormous fortification was built in so remote a place, but forts like Dún Aonghasa were once fairly common across western and northern Europe. Most, however, have been lost to decay, erosion, and the reuse of stones. It is only in remote places like Inishmore that they still survive.

Thoughts for writers

Just a simple thought today: the world is full of interesting possibilities. Fortresses don’t have to look like medieval castles. Religious sites don’t have to look like cathedrals or Greek temples. History is huge and there are amazing things out there to inspire your imagination.

History for Writers is a weekly feature which looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool. From worldbuilding to dialogue, history helps you write. Check out the introduction to History for Writers here.

Fan-Made Doctor Strange Credits Sequence

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Alex Silver (of This Is Productions) made a charmingly comic-like Doctor Strange credits sequence that’s definitely worth seeing:

Doctor Strange Title Sequence from This Is Productions on Vimeo.

Found via Collider.

The actual dose of the Doctor is still a ways away – according to IMDB, the release date is November 04, 2016. I know next to nothing about the character nor the work of screenwriter Jon Spaihts or director Scott Derrickson, but I’ve enjoyed the work of confirmed actors Benedict Cumberbatch plus Tilda Swinton, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Mads Mikkelsen (in negotiations). It remains to be seen how the movie will tie to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Men, Women, and Games

Erik

Lots of women play video games, and lots of gamers are women. This is not news, yet for some reason we have to keep saying it.

The august Pew Research Center was the most recent group to say it. Here’s their Teens, Technology, and Friendships report from earlier this month about how teens use games, among other online services, to connect with one another. Among many other findings, 84% of teenage boys reported playing video games, as did 59% of teenage girls. All teens reported playing a wide variety of different types of games (which is to say: no, all those teenage girl gamers are not just poking at Barbie Sparkle Kardashian Krush on their phones; they’re doing everything from hacking up orcs in World of Warcraft to building imperial star destroyers in Minecraft).

So, if there are so many women playing games, why don’t male gamers see them? The results of another recent study, Insights into Sexism: Male Status and Performance Moderates Female-Directed Hostile and Amicable Behavior by Michael M. Kasumovic and Jeffery H. Kuznekoff showed that male gamers (specifically playing Halo 3) tended to be more aggressive and abusive in voice chat to players who sounded female than those who sounded male. Also not news. Anyone who’s spent time in any online chat environment is likely to have seen the kind of dreck that gets spewed at women who let their identities be known, so it’s understandable that many female gamers choose to conceal their gender when in mixed company.

The Kasumovic and Kuznekoff study offers another interesting detail, however. The abuse directed at the female-voiced player came primarily from male players who were performing poorly, while men who were doing well at the game tended to be positive or neutral in their comments.

I see three important takeaways from these two studies:

  1. There are women in your games. In fact, if you play a multiplayer game, they are all around you. Just because you don’t know they are there doesn’t mean they aren’t. If you don’t hear women’s voices, it only means that the environment is toxic enough that many women choose to stay silent rather than have to deal with it.
  2. The men who harass women in games are not doing it mindlessly or randomly. They are not equal-opportunity dirt-spewers but target women specifically because they are trying to reassert their position in a hierarchy. The people most invested in any hierarchy are not the ones at the top but the ones who are afraid of falling to the bottom.
  3. If you are a male gamer and you want to look like you’re at the top of your game: don’t spew crap at the women around you. Good gamers are decent to their fellow players. The only ones who feel the need to put others down are the scrubs who can’t cut it.

Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.

Back to School with a Harry Potter Theme

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Reddit user 86thdj shared their wife’s classroom, which she decorated with a Harry Potter theme. And it’s magical!

Reddit User 86thdj Imgur Potter Classroom1
Reddit User 86thdj on Imgur
Reddit User 86thdj Imgur Potter Classroom2
Reddit User 86thdj on Imgur
Reddit User 86thdj Imgur Potter Classroom3
Reddit User 86thdj on Imgur
Reddit User 86thdj Imgur Potter Classroom4
Reddit User 86thdj on Imgur

Make sure you see the rest of the photos on Imgur.

I just love the 9 ¾ door and the flying envelopes – very low effort but big impact. And that’s not all – first of all, every student will get their Hogwarts letter, and, later in the year, the kids will be quizzed and sorted into houses. The discussion on Reddit also touches on the kind of teaching that this room is meant for, so it should be helpful for other teachers.

Looks like it will be a lot of fun both for the teacher and the kids! I can’t but echo one of the commenters – “So awesome!! Keep being amazing!!”

In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.

Hugh Jackman to Play Odysseus?

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Hugh Jackman might play the eponymous protagonist in the forthcoming Odyssey movie.

Twitter Hugh Jackman

According to The Wrap,

“[…] Jackman doesn’t have a deal in place yet but has had multiple conversations with the filmmaking team about playing Odysseus, the hero of the film who embarks on a long voyage home following the conclusion of the Trojan War.”

I rather like Jackman’s work, and it also turns out he has actual Greek ancestry which is nice. (Too bad that Chris Sarandon, who also is of Greek issue, is too old now; he’d make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts Odysseus.)

Image: Hugh Jackman on Twitter

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

The Case of the Missing Roman Railroads

Erik

150824AeliopileThe Roman empire had a problem. It was just too big. When a crisis developed on one frontier, it could take weeks for the emperor to hear about it, then months or even years to move troops and supplies into position to deal with it. The large frontier army consumed supplies which had to be delivered at great expense from the agricultural heartlands. The roads built by the Roman army helped make all this travel faster and easier, but if the Romans had built railroads they could have made it much easier still. A Roman empire with railroads might not have fallen apart in the fifth century CE. So why didn’t the Romans build them?

The obvious answer is that they didn’t have the technology of steam power, nor the resources of coal and iron needed to build a functioning railroad. It’s a good answer, but like many such obvious answers it’s missing something.

Continue reading →

OMG OMG OMG OMG – Worldcon 2017 in Helsinki!

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The biiiig thing in the SFF fandom this year has been the Hugo kerfuffle. Erik and I have followed and talked about it, but engaged more with the 2017 Worldcon campaign. Helsinki in 2017 is one of four bids, competing with D.C., Montreal, and Nippon.

I haven’t been involved with Worldcons before, but the prospect of a major international con in Finland, during our centennial of independence to boot, was just too good to pass. As a Finn and a part of the Finnish fandom, I know Finns put together smooth, professional, kick-ass events.

hki2017-logo

Site selection for the 2017 con was decided by voting among this year’s Worldcon members. Voting closed last night. Aaaaaand we won!

Kermit flail!

Kermit Flail

At this writing, the results are still unofficial, but as they are undisputed, it’s pretty much a given that we’ll have a Finnish Worldcon.

I’m so, so happy for my compatriots and co-geeks, and thankful to everyone who voted and spread the word. We did it! Suurkiitos!

Disclaimer: I’m a supporter of the bid, and also sewed a bunch of items bearing the bid logo for the bid to give away. More at my business blog and Flickr.

Kermit flail image: Via Walker—Bait on Tumblr.

Ant-Man’s Unanswered Question

Erik

We finally got around to seeing Ant-Man a couple of days ago. I know that movie is so last month and everybody’s moved on to other things, but I have a few thoughts to share. There will be spoilers, just in case you’re even later than me in getting around to this movie.

150820Ant-manI liked Ant-Man. I put it in the middling range of the Marvel moves along with the first and third Iron Man films. It kept me entertained on a hot summer day, it held together a lot better than the noble failure that was Avengers 2, and it didn’t insult me like last summer’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The jokes landed, the characters were interesting, and the story was fun. My strongest impression of the movie, though, is that it kept asking and conspicuously failing to answer one question: Why is Hope not putting on the suit?

The central plot of the movie is the heist to steal and destroy the Yellowjacket weapon prototype before evil corporate genius Darren Cross can unleash it on the world. Inventor Hank Pym recruits good-hearted cat burglar Scott Lang to don the Ant-Man super-shrinking-and-insect-mind-control tech to get the job done, even though Hank’s daughter Hope van Dyne is obviously a better choice. She already knows about the technology and how to use it. She has access to the facility that is the target of the heist. She is smart, cool-headed, and tough. Why do they need Scott?

The movie half-heartedly offers a few possible answers, but it seems to be aware that none of them really holds up.

Because Scott is such an awesomely inventive cat burglar

Eh. The script does the bare minimum job of showing us Scott thinking on his feet. It’s okay, but it’s hardly persuasive. In any case, the Yellowjacket heist is already planned out; not much on-feet thinking required. At best, Scott could be useful on the coms Leverage-style to advise Hope in case of surprises. We really don’t see any of that vaunted inventiveness at play in the heist.

Because Hope needs to stick with Cross during the heist

Apparently not, because she really doesn’t do anything important during the heist besides help a wounded Hank get out of the building. Her presence with Cross doesn’t seem to make any contribution to pulling the heist off.

Because her father is afraid for her safety if she uses the Ant-suit

That’s fine. He can worry. We all worry about the people we care about. Pepper Potts worries about Tony Stark. Laura Barton worries about Clint. That’s not a reason for them not to suit up and get the job done when it matters.

Because she gets to be Wasp in the next movie

Great! Why couldn’t she be Wasp in this movie? “It’s about damn time,” she says as she eyes the Wasp suit at the end of the film. It was about damn time at the start of the film, too.

I give Ant-Man credit for at least tacitly acknowledging that none of these reasons stands up. We need more good female superheroes (and villains, for that matter) on our screens and there’s no good reason why we don’t have them already. I take Ant-Man as an admission from Marvel that they recognize the problem, and that’s a step towards fixing it. Whether they are willing to take the next step of actually giving us the female characters we’ve been waiting for is another unanswered question.

Image: Comic-Con Ant-Man Poster via Wikimedia

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

Visual Inspiration: Ostrich Riding

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Last week, I shared the image of an ostrich cart. There must’ve been random serendipity rays in the air, because this week I happened on a photo of someone actually riding an ostrich:

Man riding an ostrich at the Cawston ostrich farm, South Pasadena, California. Via Elle Decor, June 2014, p. 67.
Man riding an ostrich at the Cawston ostrich farm, South Pasadena, California. Via Elle Decor, June 2014, p. 67.

Cawston ostrich farm. Postcard by Detroit Photographic Company; South Pasadena, California, unknown date. From the collection of Marc Walter, published in An American Odyssey: Photos from the Detroit Photographic Company, 1888-1924, by Marc Walter and Sabine Arqué (Taschen, 2014). Found in Elle Decor magazine, June 2014, p. 67.

Huh. I used to think that the various tallstrider or hawkstrider type mounts in World of Warcraft were based more on fantasy than fact. I’m sure large birds come with a host of training and handling issues, but apparently it’s not as far-fetched as I thought. On the other hand, having grown up two hours south of the Arctic Circle and traveled in Lapland multiple times, seeing reindeer doesn’t make me bat an eye. Just goes to show how our experiences influence our sense of normal. 🙂

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Hypothetical Rock-ing Doctor Who and Companion

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Upon seeing Hayley Atwell declare her desire to be Doctor Who in this tweet…

https://twitter.com/HayleyAtwell/status/632269411424927744

…Carolyn Cox at The Mary Sue suggested that Atwell’s Doctor be paired with a companion played by The Rock (who apparently is hankering to work with Atwell).

Oh, yes! Where can I throw my money at to make this happen?!

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.