Eppu – Page 18 – Co-Geeking

Ukraine Is at War, and I’m Not Okay

February 28, 2022October 27, 2024Eppu3 Comments

Russia has attacked Ukraine, and I’m not okay.

Russia’s unprovoked attack is not okay. The Russian president’s mumbo jumbo about annexation of historical areas is exactly that. Neither the Russian Empire nor Soviet Union exist anymore. If we go down that path, we might as well cry out for the restoration of the Roman Empire, other empires, or basically any polities for “historical” “reasons”.

Arienne King World History Encyclopedia Map of the Mongol Empire

As a Finn, I am not intellectually okay with this.

Nor do I feel okay.

My age group has grown up in peace, but we have grandparents who lived through our two modern wars with Russia, and you can bet your pants some of our parents carry some inherited wounds. I have a friend, in fact, who grew up in the east near the Russian border. People there had a habit of saying “When the Russians come, [blah blah blah]”. Not if—when.

We remember.

I bet the same conversation is happening all over Eastern and Central Europe now as we are having here jn Debrecen, Hungary at Saturday dinner. The older people are talking about what it was like under Russian occupation. Everyone remembers.
— Theodora Goss (@theodoragoss) February 26, 2022

The responsibility for this heinous act lies with Russia, and Russia alone.

Ukraine may be a lot bigger than Finland, but I wish them every ounce of dedication, not to mention willfulness and obstinancy I can muster.

I’m not okay. But I will be better. In the meanwhile, I’ve made donations, and I’m following the situation.

Images: Map of the Mongol empire by Arienne King via World History Encyclopedia (CC BY-NC -SA 4.0). Map of not Russia via Jon Cooper on Twitter.

Announcements from your hosts.

Fine Art as a Three-in-One Quilt

February 9, 2022January 16, 2022Eppu

Check out this mind-blowing quilt simultaneously copying three fine arts pieces, namely Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, and Edvard Munch’s The Scream:

Even the intricate gold frame is sewn!

This astounding piece is called “Sleep, Play, Scream” and it was made by Flora Joy. She was deservedly awarded for her innovative trispective technique.

Any time I come across someone, typically an older white man (seriously, dudes, you’ve got to do better), sneering at sewing or other textile work, I can’t but shake my head. Poor twits, showing what they emphatically don’t know jack shit about.

Images via Good Stuff Happened Today on Tumblr

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Nerdy Achievement: One Million Gold Pieces Total

January 26, 2022January 9, 2022Eppu

For quite some time, I’ve been planning to buy a stack of game time tokens, which of course means gold farming and saving. So, I was very pleased when I hit the mythical sum of one million earlier this month.

I bought a stack of tokens a few years ago, too, but as the going rate was much lower, I never came near a million then.

Of course it’s all imaginary, and of course it’s all gone again, but it was neat for a while to be a millionaire—even in a computer game. 🙂

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

First Trailer for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

January 12, 2022January 2, 2022Eppu

Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next installment, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, has its first trailer out.

Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness | Official Teaser by Marvel Entertainment on YouTube

Due to pandemic restrictions and some bad luck, we still haven’t seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, so I don’t yet know what relevance, if any, Peter Parker and Doctor Strange’s shenanigans in that movie might have to Strange’s second solo adventure.

(Come to think of it, I completely missed posting the trailers for No Way Home. For my information, here are links to the first official NWH trailer and the second official NWH trailer.)

Strange has never been one of my favorite characters, and so far this trailer doesn’t remedy that. We do see a number of repeat performances by supporting characters (Wong, Mordo, Dr. Christine Palmer; Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin) and a few tantalizing glimpses of entirely new acquaintances. The inclusion of Wanda Maximoff was a pleasant surprise; I hope we’ll see as much of her as possible.

At this writing, MoM is set to release on May 06, 2022.

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

Winter’s Greetings!

December 15, 2021December 15, 2024Eppu

It’s been a tough two years, and even now no-one can say with certainty that we’ve seen the end of the pandemic. I do hope it’s close, though.

Erik and I have settled into our new home. However, as we are still wrangling some fairly laborious paperwork, we’re scaling back our writing here at Co-Geeking after the new year. (We’ll see how many braincells are going to lose their will to live after dealing with international taxes, urgh…)

In the meanwhile: Merry Everything! We hope your end-of-the-year celebrations bring you joy, whichever shape it may take. See you again in 2022!

Announcements from your hosts.

Solar Foods is an International NASA Space Foods Winner

December 8, 2021November 28, 2021Eppu

Solar Foods, a Finnish food tech company from Lappeenranta, Finland, has been selected as one of the international winners of the Phase 1 of NASA’s Deep Space Food Challenge.

Solein is a protein made from electricity, air, and carbon dioxide, plus added nutrients. The process involves fermentation, and produces a nutrient-rich powder whose macronutrient composition is very similar to that of dried soy or algae.

Ten teams were honored in the international and 18 in the U.S. section of the challenge.

Congrats!

Image: Solein foods by Solar Foods.

Swedish Riksdaler Plate Money Could Seriously Weigh You Down

December 1, 2021April 17, 2022Eppu1 Comment

Did you know that Sweden used to be a major power in northern Europe? A major power as in having land holdings pretty much all around the Baltic Sea and even beyond? If I hadn’t learned that at school, I probably wouldn’t know; it’s really not talked about much these days.

Anyway. One fascinating detail from my classes that has stayed with me is the large riksdaler plate money (Swedish: plåtmynt). They were circulated in the 17th to 18th centuries to reduce the costs of minting coins and ease the transportation of money.

The riksdaler could be quite large. For example, according to my old history book, the 1644 coin measured 20 x 70 cm (approximately 8″ x 27″) and weighed 19,7 kg (approx. 43-44 lbs). The one pictured below is from 1744 and obviously not nearly as big as that.

What if in your secondary fantasy world, instead of chests of thousands of coins, your intrepid adventurers had to deal with large metal sheet money, a dozen or so to a chest? Wouldn’t that be an interesting worldbuilding detail?

Image: Anja Laurila et al. Historia kurssi III. Porvoo: WSOY, 1990, p. 73.

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.

Visual Inspiration: Traditional Textile Patterns and Colors on Outdoor Stairs

November 17, 2021October 24, 2021Eppu

In Lima, Peru, artist Xomatoc and local residents painted a number of stairs with colors and combinations more typically associated with traditional South American blankets and other textiles.

Colossal Jeremy Flores Xomatoc Striped Staircase

This project was a part of the Pinta Lima Bicentenario. Xomatoc’s project was only one of public art installations painted around the municipality to celebrate each participating neighborhood’s history and cultural memory.

Municipalidad de Lima Bicentenario Painting

Colossal Jeremy Flores Xomatoc Diamond-Pattern Staircase

The length of the stairs, the vibrant colors, and the large enough scale of these patterns make them really eyecatching. And, good grief, the degree of the slopes! (I grew up essentially on a flood plain, which is why mountains look so drastic to me.) The stairs definitely will be visible a long way.

Found via Colossal.

Images: Striped and diamond-patterned stairs by Jeremy Flores via Colossal. Painting in progress via Municipalidad de Lima.

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Earliest Singular They According to the OED

November 10, 2021October 15, 2022Eppu

I’ve long been seeing mentions that the use of the plural pronoun they to refer to a singular antecedent is older than the present attempt to introduce it as a gender-neutral option. Here’s a little history I ran across.

Dennis Baron, Professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, blogs about singular they for The Oxford English Dictionary. According to him, the oldest recorded use within the OED is from 1375, in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.

BrLib Digital Catalogue Illuminated MSS Royal 10 E IV f12 Detail

Continues Baron:

“Here’s the Middle English version: ‘Hastely hiȝed eche . . . þei neyȝþed so neiȝh . . . þere william & his worþi lef were liand i-fere.’ In modern English, that’s: ‘Each man hurried . . . till they drew near . . . where William and his darling were lying together.’ [original emphasis]

“Since forms may exist in speech long before they’re written down, it’s likely that singular they was common even before the late fourteenth century. That makes an old form even older.”

Since I’m a Finn and we don’t have grammatical gender in our language, singular they seems natural to me. In fact, I fail to see a reason to choose to kick up a major kerfuffle over it; after all, (normative) English already mixes up the numbers with singular and plural you.

I’m pretty sure that within the past decade or so I have spotted multiple examples from non-woke modern English sources, both television series and novels, that do use singular they seemingly unconsciously, very naturally, and entirely unambiguously. I wish I had realized to write them down for my own interest.

Image: Group of men, detail of illuminated manuscript Royal 10 E IV, f. 12, via The British Library Digital Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts (France, S. [Toulouse?]; last quarter of the 13th century or 1st quarter of the 14th century; illuminated manuscript)

On, of, and about languages.