Here’s all the best for your end-of-the-year celebrations, whichever shape they may take. Stay safe.
We’re vacationing for the rest of the year, very much enjoying not being bored at home. 🙂
Until 2026, Happy Merry!
Image: screencap from World of Warcraft
Announcements from your hosts.
The other day I was browsing a random blog. Seeing a post title “101 Things to Do When Bored at Home” or something to that effect, I turned to Erik and said: “I don’t understand the concept.”
I truly don’t, not for my part!
We’re both introverts who love our home. Home is where our books are. Where we can watch tv in comfort. Play games. Craft, sew, write. Go nap or lie down with a blanket to think about things. Heck, even clean or mend things—it’s something to do, and we do enjoy a well-functioning home (even if cleaning and mending aren’t favorite pastimes themselves).
I literally can’t remember the last time I’ve been bored at home.
I can—and do—give my brain rest breaks. Idling is important to creativity, which is important to all of life, if you ask me. But boredom…? Nope. It just doesn’t happen, there’s so much to do.
I’m actually looking forward to the time when I’m old enough to need less sleep—more time to enjoy being conscious! 🙂
Here there be opinions!
We’ve played The War Within: Legion Remix since finding out that some player housing decor items will be released through it. I made myself a female Dwarf paladin—always a favorite combo—but decided to try something a little different (for me, that is).
So, saved for posterity, here’s my silver-toned Earthen retribution pally.
I’ve hidden the helmet, wrist, belt, and boot slots, and I’m not using a shirt or tabard for this look either. The Dueler’s Snowy Shoulder Cape and Aspiring Aspirant’s Drape make a fantastic combo for the shoulder and back slots. The Overlord’s Chestplate is an older design, but its relatively smooth front makes up for the clunky pixels, and the chain mail underlayer in the model does not detract from the look I had in mind.
Dauntless Handguards plus Long Snowy War Skirt and Leg Wraps finish off the outfit. Since she’s a paladin and mostly covered in armor, I kept her gems to a minimum, just a knuckle cluster on one hand. Her white mohawk hairdo and white-grey eyes form a large part of the striking look. I assume because she’s an Earthen, there’s a prismatic sheen to her hair that’s just amazing. Her weapon is one version of The Ashbringer.
If interested, you can have a look at the set in Wowhead’s Dressing Room.
Images: World of Warcraft screencaps
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
2025 saw the beginning of production on another new screen adaptation of a Jane Austen story besides Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice—a remake of Sense and Sensibility is also in the works.
The film is directed by Georgia Oakley (who is, sadly, completely unfamiliar to me both as director and writer), and bestselling author Diana Reid wrote the screenplay (ditto).
Elinor is played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, Marianne by Esmé Creed-Miles, Margaret by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, and Mrs. Dashwood by Caitríona Balfe. Outside the Dashwood family, we’ll have George MacKay as Edward Ferrars, Frank Dillane as John Willoughby, and Herbert Nordrum as Colonel Brandon.
I’ve seen Balfe in a few random episodes of Outlander, but otherwise the core cast is unknown to me. (Well, technically I have seen Dillane as a 16-year-old version of Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince 15+ years ago, but don’t remember a thing of such a fleeting experience.) It’s actually rather refreshing to get to see a production without preconceptions.
Also starring will be Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings, whom I really like as Mrs. Croft in the 1995 Persuasion and as Maarva in Andor. (I always forget her truly excellent performance as Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter adaptations because the character is so repulsive.) The funny marvelous thing is that Shaw has also been cast in Netflix’s Pride and Prejudice as Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Her performances alone should be worth seeing both new versions!
The new S&S adaptation by Focus Features and Working Title Films is in post-production at this writing. The shooting started in July 2025 and, according to IMDB, the U.S. and U.K. release dates are set in September 2026.
Yay! Good times for us Jane Austen fans. 🙂
Images via IMDB, mashup by Eppu Jensen: Esmé Creed-Miles. Frank Dillane by Jesse Grant / Getty Images. Daisy Edgar-Jones by Faye Thomas. George MacKay by David M. Bennett / Getty Images.
I find that this fall I need to go all out on coziness to try and offset some of the horrible in the world. My comfort browsing therefore includes several of the core aesthetics: cozycore, naturecore, forestcore, summercore, hobbitcore, cottagecore, and more.
In addition to comfy things, now and then you find something simply stupendous. For instance, Reddit user Green-Cockroach-8448 makes just incredible, absolutely jaw-dropping cakes. Here are two examples that I adore:
The incredible thing is that she bakes as a hobby, not professionally. These results definitely do put some professional efforts to shame, they’re so astounding. My gast is thoroughly flabbered.
With these mouth-watering treats we wish a Happy Thanksgiving to our readers in the U.S.!
Images by Green-Cockroach-8448 on Reddit: Blue cake. White cake.
In Making Stuff we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
Lately Erik and I have been preparing for the new player housing in World of Warcraft, to be released before the upcoming Midnight expansion. Before that arrives, though, there’s a little detail in the current expansion, The War Within, that I want to save for posterity. (Even if it’s just myself. 🙂 )
Blizzard is known for using references to pop culture personages or phenomena in WoW. What comes immediately to mind is Rio Duran (a Duran Duran reference) in Mount Hyjal, Harrison Jones (Harrison Ford / Indiana Jones), the Very Light Sabre swords (Star Wars lightsabers), and Haris Pilton (Paris Hilton) in Shattrath City, for example.
Now there is also a compatriot of mine! The Finnish artist Darude has been immortalized as D’rude, a randomly appearing NPC found in delves. One of the mob’s abilities is Sandstorm, which confirms it. “Sandstorm” was Darude’s big hit single in 1999, and still pops up here and there.
Incidentally, the “Sandstorm” music video with parkour and running (so much running!) around southern Helsinki was directed by Juuso Syrjä and has become a bit of a hit, too, with over 300 million views.
Darude – Sandstorm by Darude on YouTube
To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Darude’s career, a Sandstorm Run event was held in Helsinki, Finland, at the end of this August. We were not in town for it, but we did save a map of the route and walked it later for our own enjoyment.
Anyway, Finland was mentioned! Torille! 🙂
Images: Screencaps of D’rude by Eppu Jensen and by Krionix via Wowhead. Finland Mentioned by moerkoet via Reddit Finnishmemes.
Of Dice and Dragons talks about games and gaming.
I was browsing a ren faire board the other day for research. Someone there was asking for inspiration and advice, saying they usually dress “quite gothic”, which I somehow misread as “white gothic”.
That would be really interesting, I thought, and wanted to check whether it’s a thing… And of course it is! Known as white goth or ice goth: instead of the ubiquitous black, dressing only (or mostly) in white, but spiky or moody, sometimes puffy or lacy or ruffly, too.
Then I poked around some more. I already knew that various flavors of goth aesthetic exist, of course, but I was specifically interested in color-based ones. Apart from red and purple goth, less immediately obvious colors such as pastel goth (especially pink goth looks big), blue, and green goth do seem to exist. Yellow, orange, and brown goth seem marginal (with varying levels of recognition), but there doesn’t seem to be gold, silver, or bronze goth, per se.
The most intriguing find, I think, emerged from my yellow goth search. There seems to be some interest in dressing styles inspired by bugs, including bees. One seller on Etsy even used both the word bee and goth in their sweater description. (Personally, I couldn’t call that sweater goth style, but you do you.) Below is a bee-inspired ensemble by EJ on Pinterest that the user labeled as “yellow Y2K goth outfit”:
So, there’s bee goth now? Bee core? (Buzz core???)
Live and learn!
Images: Mashup by Eppu Jensen: red and black outfits by hystericb0y on Tumblr; purple goth by sabikuma on tiktok, found via peri on Pinterest; blue goth by dogmaz on Tumblr; green goth via Yasmin on Pinterest; white goth via Mabel Manley on Pinterest. Yellow Y2K goth outfit (bee goth) by EJ on Pinterest.
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
Jimtheviking on Tumblr wrote about how the Dwarven names in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit connect with Old Norse, especially Dwarf names listed in the poem Völuspá.
According to Jimtheviking, Tolkien chose a number of names from Old Norse and tweaked those names in an interesting way. Namely, Tolkien grasped Old Norse grammar well enough to know that the omission of one n from a name ending in –inn changed it from masculine to feminine. To quote Jimtheviking:
“Well, I give you the names of the Dwarves from the Hobbit, as they appear in Dvergatal (stanzas 14-16) and in the order they appear:
“Dvalins, Dáinn, Bívurr, Bávurr, Bömburr, Nóri, Óinn, Þorinn, Þráinn, Fíli, Kíli, Glóinn, Dóri, Óri
“Now, in the Hobbit, they’re named as follows:
“Dwalin, Dáin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Óin, Thorin, Thráin, Fíli, Kíli, Glóin, Dori, Ori.
“Now, you notice something with the way those names got changed? That’s right, he changed the masculine -inn definite suffix to -in, which is feminine.
“That means that, at least grammatically, Dwalin, Dáin, Thorin, Thráin, and Glóin are female Dwarves.”
Then, moving on from purely linguistic, Jimtheviking continues with an intriguing argument:
“Since we know Tolkien was meticulous about his grammar, this was done most likely as an in-joke […] [emphasis original]
“But there’s a not-inconceivable chance that the Dwarves were using the masculine pronouns in Westron because that’s what the Men who met them used, despite the fact that a third of the company was female, and hey, it’s kinda neat to think he wrote a bunch of Dwarf-ladies going on an adventure.”
It is really interesting, isn’t it, to posit male and female Dwarves in Tolkien’s adventures?!
Poking around, I found versions of Völuspá that differ from the Dwarf list as given by Jimtheviking*. Not just the list itself, but also spellings differ depending on the edition you’re using (which isn’t rare at all in philology). Nevertheless, the main point stands: Tolkien changed names that had –inn in the original to just –in in English.
Of all Tolkien’s Dwarf names, he seems to have adopted Durin, Dwalin, Náin, Dáin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Nori, Óin, Thorin, Thrór, Thráin, Fíli, Kíli, Fundin, Náli, Oakenshield (Eikinskjaldi, cf. Icelandic ‘oak shield’), Glóin, Dori, and Ori from the Völuspá.
Of them, Durinn, Dvalinn, Náinn, Dáinn, Óinn, Þorinn, Þráinn, Fundinn, and Glóinn are all originally spelled with a double n. (In addition, there’s a change from a double r to a single one in Bívurr / Bívǫrr, Bávurr / Bávǫrr, and Bömburr / Bǫmburr, which Jimtheviking does also comment on.)
Anyway, the whole thing kinda reminds me of the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, decades ago now. I was young enough that it was in translation, which means the young me ploughing through LotR was quite confused over the gender of some characters. The Finnish language doesn’t have grammatical gender, you see. Instead of he or she, we just have one third-person singular pronoun, hän, which is used of all people regardless of sex, gender, age, kinship, marital status, whatever, just like the English third-person plural they is. Normatively, in Finnish everyone is a hän.
Even at that young age, I knew that (apart from Astrid Lindgren) most of the publications, including those for the younger audience, centered boys and male characters. Contextually, I could tell that Frodo and Sam were male. Same for Legolas and Gimli, Aragorn and Boromir, and Gandalf and Elrond. Arwen, Galadriel, and Eowyn were female.
But Glorfindel? Maybe male, I thought, but there is nothing explicit at all in the Finnish translation. And Merri and Pippin? Somehow at that time I couldn’t make them out at all; indeed, they’re the two characters whose gender confused the young me the most.
Having grown up reading the Moomins, Pippi Longstocking, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, The Famous Five series, and The Dark Is Rising sequence, I saw nothing odd in girls and women also going on adventures. So I thought it was quite plausible that Merri and Pippin could be female, and was too young to read all of the textual cues that imply they aren’t. (Remember that in Finnish the gender-neutral pronoun hän gives absolutely no clue whatsoever about anyone’s gender.)
The possibility of a linguistic in-joke regarding these Dwarven names really tickles the imagination and would be completely plausible of Tolkien. Interestingly, the name Gandalf also originally comes from the Dvergatal (see e.g. stanza 12 in Pettit’s 2023 edition, which lists the name as Gandálfr). A Dwarven Gandalf would, indeed, give quite a different vibe to LotR.
And now I kinda want new movies of The Hobbit, with the amazing attention to detail that Weta lavished on the effects and props in Peter Jackson’s versions, but with more heedful writing and with half the Dwarves in the party female. That would be a truly intriguing take!
Images: Thorin cosplay by Alexander Turchanin on 500px.
*) Dwarves are named in stanzas 10-16, starting with Mótsognir and Durinn. The undated Völuspá version linked to by Jimtheviking, edited by Guðni Jónsson, includes more rows than the newest edition I found. The extra lines must come from (an)other extant version(s) of the text.
Names in the undated Völuspá version linked to by Jimtheviking (ed. Guðni Jónsson):
Durin (stanza 10: Durinn)
Dwalin (11: Dvalinn)
Náin (11: Náinn)
Dáin (11: Dáinn)
Bifur (11: Bívurr)
Bofur (11: Bávurr)
Bombur (11: Bömburr)
Nori (11: Nóri)
Óin (11: Óinn)
Thorin (12: Þorinn)
Thrór (12: Þrár)
Thráin (12: Þráinn)
Fíli (13)
Kíli (13)
Fundin (13: Fundinn)
Náli (13)
Oakenshield (13, 16: Eikinskjaldi)
Glóin (15: Glóinn)
Dori (15: Dóri)
Ori (15: Óri)
Names in Edward Pettit’s 2023 edition of the Völuspá:
Durin (stanza 10: Durinn)
Dwalin (11: Dvalinn)
Bifur (11: Bívǫrr)
Bofur (11: Bávǫrr)
Bombur (11: Bǫmburr)
Nori (11: Nóri)
Thrain (12: Þráinn)
Thorin (12: Þorinn)
Thrór (12: Þrór)
Fíli (13)
Kíli (13)
Fundin (13: Fundinn)
Náli (13)
Oakenshield (13, 16: Eikinskjaldi)
Gloin (15: Glói)
Note that Pettit’s version doesn’t include Náin, Dáin, Óin, Dori, or Ori.
On, of, and about languages.
The European Space Agency has released a new three-plus-minute Mars flyover video based on images transmitted by the Mars Express orbiter.
ESA’s Mars Express takes viewers on a flight over Xanthe Terra, a highland region just north of the equator. The film is a mosaic created from images taken during single-orbit observations by Mars Express’s High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC). The images were combined with topography information from a digital terrain model (DTM) to create a three-dimensional view of the Martian landscape. The main feature in this video is Shalbatan Vallis, a 1300 km-long (~800 mi) outflow channel that transitions from the Southern Highlands to the Northern Lowlands.
(Note: The image above is merely a screencap; follow the text links to see the video on ESA’s site.)
There are two amazing things about this video. First, as large as the area clearly is, compared to the rotating image of the planet in the very beginning, the features we see are completely dwarfed by Valles Marineris (the huge canyon south of Xanthe Terra). And second, the amount of detail is surprisingly ample. I wonder how much an exogeologist would be able to deduce?
I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: it is a very good time to be a space geek. 🙂
(Also interesting to me, at least, is that since the video is silent, my brain started playing the main theme from the movie Gravity. Space imagery must be accompanied by majestic music now?)
Found via File 770.
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
There’s a brilliant version of Star Trek: Discovery theme—in disco style:
Star Trek Discovery Theme but the theme is DISCO by Craven In Outer Space on YouTube
It really packs a lot into its minute-and-a-half running time. I can’t figure out a single thing that’s extraneous or out of place; everything fits either into disco or Discovery, even the tempo change at the end. Ha! 🙂
Found via Daniël Franke on Mastodon.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
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