Time for the annual turkey day!
We will not be eating this handsome fella from our back yard. đ
We don’t necessarily get to see the turkeys displaying every spring, but often we do. It’s always such a sightâincredible birds in so many senses.
Happy Thanksgiving to our readers who celebrate!
Image by Eppu Jensen
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
After months of working on it, we opened up Dark Iron Dwarves last week. Yay! I’ve been leveling my new DI paladin a bit, getting a sense of the new-to-me racial abilities. They include Mole Machine, a way to quickly change locations by tunneling through the earth.
We’ve been rewatcing and rating Murdoch Mysteries for our project for a while now. A seventh-season episode, “Journey to the Centre of Toronto”, has a burrowing or boring machine that should look very familiar to World of Warcraft players.
It’s a mole machine, right? Right!?!
The episode doesn’t actually ever call the device mole machine, but some of the characters do talk about hypothetical mole people who live underground. I wonder whether there are any WoWers in the writers’ room? đ
In any case, even though the series seems to otherwise strive towards reasonable accuracy, now and then they definitely veer into SSFnal or steampunk-ish. I love the tongue-firmly-in-cheek attitude!
Images: screenshot from the tv series Murdoch Mysteries, season 7, episode 11, “Journey to the Centre of Toronto”. World of Warcraft screencap with Dark Iron Dwarf mole machine in Westfall.
In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.
I’ve been meaning to share this for a while now, but something or other was always supposedly more important or interesting. No more! đ
The Viking Age Sigtuna, Sweden, was formally founded around 980 AD, and it was a much more cosmopolitan city than thought before. According to new DNA analysis, approximately half of city’s population were immigrants.
The study looked at the remnants of 38 individuals who lived and died in Sigtuna between the 900s and 1100s CE, and included other scientific approaches as well (like analysing the strontium isotope contents of the residents’ teeth).
Roughly half of the population grew up in the near-by region MĂ€lardalen (the MĂ€laren Valley, or Stockholm-MĂ€laren Region). The other half arrived either from southern Scandinavia (including Norway and Denmark) or further away. The long-distance immigrants came from the British Isles, Ukraine, Lithuania, northern Germany, and other parts of central Europe, and were more likely to be women than men (approx. 70 percent of women vs. 44 percent of the men).
Read more on the Stockholm University research news page: article in Swedish / article in English.
I guess I’m by far not the first woman to fall in love with a Viking and to move far away with him. đ
Found via Yle uutiset.
Image: section of a Viking rune stone from Sigtuna by Guillén Pérez on Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
As you may know, speakers of Modern English are struggling to find a non-clunky and commonly accepted gender-neutral third person singular pronoun to replace the generic use of he or she.
The issue’s been periodically debated for decades, really, but lately the calls seem to have gained more urgency. There are many contenders, among them e / em / eir and ze / hir / hir.
Singular they may be gaining some ground, or at least growing in popularity here in the U.S. I’ve seen references to a long history of using they in that manner, but these references usually give no examples. (Maybe I just haven’t been reading the better articles? Also, one sometimes wonders why the British use of one has fallen out in other world Englishes.)
In any case, as an Anglo-Saxonist, it’s beyond my era and/or expertise. Nevertheless, I’m curious about any early examples. Here’s the oldest I’ve noticed so far, from a 1938 Hercule Poirot novel:
âPilar said gravely: ‘If I had an enemyâif anyone hated me and I hated themâthen I would cut my enemy’s throat like this….’â
â Agatha Christie: Hercule Poirot’s Christmas, p. 18 (original emphasis)
This example is great, because it’s clear and unquestionable. I’m pretty sure there are a few singular theys in Jane Austen’s novels, but I can’t remember where. Maybe it’s the perfect time for a re-read. đ
Christie, Agatha. Hercule Poirot’s Christmas. New York, NY: Black Dog & Leventhal, 1938.
Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.
We got our first toons leveled to 120 about two months ago. Typically we level our Night Elf druid pair first because you just can’t beat a druid duo of a tank plus dps with an occasional heal for versatility! This time, though, we chose two humans for strategic reasons.
We haven’t played these two together before. A paladin tank and a mistweaver monk work together fine, though. We just won’t do anything terribly fastâour damage output isn’t high, but we do tend to stay alive through everything except the nastiest dps-heavy fights.
Because of real life, we’ve been going slowly but steadily, working on accumulating the required reputation to unlock allied races. We’re not yet there on the Horde side, but we just made it to exalted with the 7th Legion on our humans!
Allied races, here we come! đ
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
Since 1991, in Gentilly, Quebec, the residents have held an annual giant pumpkin competitionâand boat race!âcalled Potirothon. The name is a portmanteau of potiron and marathon.
After weighing the entrants, some of the giant pumpkins are carved into 1-seater canoes and raced on the BĂ©cancour River.
The Potirothon race is so awesome! Although pumpkins aren’t new to me anymore, the giant variety is. This is also the first I hear of carving the giant kind. My mind immediately went to an alternate Shire, or maybe another secondary world where humanoids of a smaller stature might want to use giant hollowed-out gourds / fruit / plants as transport. Or not even necessarily humanoids; intelligent beings of any shape or size.
Found via Good Stuff Happened Today at Tumblr.
Image via kanbukai at Tumblr.
P.S. Scandinavia and the World made a comic about Potirothon!
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?
Whoa…! Crabeater seals come equipped with some serious dental power:
If I saw this on a screen, I wouldn’t believe it. I’d just put it in the âstupid, unrealistic, flashy tv / movie / game designâ bin.
Found via Cassandra Khaw on Twitter.
Images: Skull seen from the side via Cassandra Khaw on Twitter. Drawing of skull by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins via Wikipedia.
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?
In deference to the statement from Crystal Huff, we have edited this post. We have no further comment on the matter.
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An article from August 2018 produced thinky-thoughts!
Oren Ashkenazi lists âEight Absurdities We Force on Female Charactersâ. Among them is this gem:
â[S]torytellers also have to constantly remind the audience how hot their female characters are, right? At least that seems to be the case, based on how often authors emphasize their female leadsâ looks. Of course, this dual need makes writing women much harder, since readers donât typically appreciate their stories being interrupted with reminders about a characterâs sexy bod.â
Because Men Are Strong, Women Are Pretty, right?!? Gah!
Instead of an exhausted and exasperated rant, here’s my contribution to join the Smurfette Principle, Dainty Combat, et al.
A male protagonist gets to protag; a female protagonist has things happen to her.
The male protagonist is at the center of the story. He gets to make key decisions, call the shots, lead teams (successfully), and propel the plot forward.
In contrast, a female protagonist reacts to what’s happening around and/or to her. In addition, all too often women’s story arcs are marked as of less importance or condemned outright. (Or branded as a âwomen’s genreâ, often with a sneer, like romance.)
One of the first that I remember noticing on screen is J.J. Abrams’s Fringe. Anna Torv’s protagonist character Olivia Dunham, an FBI agent, started out by actively investigating potential paranormal phenomena, but in later seasons she was pushed aside in favor of the father-son drama and relationship wrangling between characters played by Joshua Jackson and (always excellent) John Noble. Egadâas if we don’t have enough!
And just the latest I’ve had the misfortune to see is the tv series Extant. Despite its gorgeous visuals, high production values, and Halle Berry as the lead, the writing keeps her guessing, defending herself against gaslighting, physically running, flailing, and emoting. Two episodes from the end I was done; I didn’t want to finish that crap.
(To be fair, I’ve also come across stories that dreadfully misrepresent men. As one example, I’ve had my fillâto the fracking brim!âof stories of damaged middle-aged alcoholics who are just trying to hang on.)
This post has been edited for clarity.
Story Time is an occasional feature all about stories and story-telling. Whether itâs on the page or on the screen, this is about how stories work and what makes us love the ones we love.
My very first WoW character, created towards the end of vanilla, was a female gnome mage. I still have herâspecced the same, tooâalthough I don’t play her as my primary anymore.
Anyway, I was looking for something else on the Internet when I fell into a hole on Tumblr and found all of this AWESOME female gnome fanart. I’ll share just five of my favorites below. And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
An alchemist by Boz:
Love the thoughtful expression!
A custom portrait of a gnome with goggles by Azuralynx (aka Niniel-Gnoll):
The grin! đ
Sketch of a mage by Bryss (aka Alynissia):
Chromie, the dragon who prefers a gnome humanoid form, by mhazaru:
A death knight by Flyingterraâshe clearly means business!
The range of illustration techniques is impressive, but even more so is how all of these artists capture the range of possibilities for gnome characters.
Much †††to artistic nerds!
Images: Alchemist by Boz on Tumblr. Portrait with goggles by Azuralynx aka Niniel-Gnoll on Tumblr. Sketch by Bryss aka Alynissia on Tumblr. Chromie by mhazaru on Tumblr. Death knight by Flyingterra on Tumblr.
Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.
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