bandit king of lunch and string

bless netflix. worst part of being sick as a kid and young adult was the long nights alone with my pain. last night i couldn’t sleep for pain, but i binged nova episodes until seebs and barb woke up and i didn’t have even one of those visceral fear/grief moments of feeling like some hunter-gatherer tribe’s unfixable problem left on the tundra to die. i was too fascinated by perovskite solar cells and ancient chinese chariots.

 

archaeology = :)

i dunno why people are so reluctant to accept that the vikings explored quite a lot in north america. now that we know for a fact they were here, it seems obvious they’d travel along coasts and up rivers every summer the whole time they were here. which was, what, a couple generations? sure they got in scuffles with the locals, but when did that ever stop vikings from doing what they wanted?

and they would have been searching for new sources of iron ore, as their stores of bog iron ran out. i would absolutely believe they made it up into the great lakes chasing the source of that wonderful mesabi red.

i mean, in those awesome ships, it would have been a matter of days to go hundreds of miles. the landscape is rich with wild food. it only takes a couple weeks to build a longhouse, slave house, and forge out of turf blocks, when you want to dig in for the winter. frankly the only limit on how far erik and leif could explore was how far they felt like going. and what was the thing vikings always felt like doing? yeah.

you’ve got a rich and battle tested outlaw crew faced with a choice: keep exploring the resource rich land with no seafaring competition, or go home where you’re not popular and do a farming.

i know what i’d pick.

ps, point rosee is where i’d build a base camp if i were planning to make a series of ventures up the st lawrence. just saying.

 

i’m having a giggle because i read this

and thought that consequently skraeling should be translated into modern vernacular as either ‘rawhide’ (whipcrack noise!) or ‘mister shouty’.

 

also i guess leif’s pleasant trading relationship with the local mister shouty tribe went tits up because a bull escaped his farm and attacked them. so they attacked the farm. and since the farmers happened to be veteran raiders with iron weapons, the shouties got merked. tragic, yes, but also kind of hilarious that it was triggered by an escaped farm animal.

 

watching one about chernobyl now. weirds me tf out when documentaries use sepia or grayscale filters to make footage from the 80s look ‘old enough’. *faint voice from corpse wagon* im not dead yet~!

 

black holes. eddington limit: too shiny to eat.

mood.

 

jj digitized the album a few years ago and i have a copy. i should figure out how to upload it somewhere.

 

re vikings: we know from contemporary written documents that leif was trading loads of timber and grapes from ‘vinland’. the newfoundland coast did not grow wild grapes even in the medieval warm period; wrong soil, too windy. so we know they went south or southwest to harvest. i think being reluctant to search for more short term settlements there isn’t sensible skepticism, it’s illogical clinging to the cultural importance of columbus.

 

columbus was there to conquer for the glory of the church and the crown, and his invasion force killed and enslaved as if the locals were harvestable animals rather than citizens of a nation under attack. this was super cool for the white supremacy agenda, which was mainstream for a long ass time. besides, there’s cities named after him. that’s got a lot of inertia.

leif, on the other hand, was the son of an outlaw, and had a strained relationship with authority. though a christian convert, he didn’t explore for god or country. it was strictly business. business and wanderlust. and he saw the native people as people. not as militarily powerful as the norse, and the fact that they wore leather instead of wool was maybe mockable. depends on whether ‘skraeling’ comes from their clothes or their battle cry.

either way, they were foreigners, not lesser beings. you trade with them if you can, fight them if you gotta. and that just doesn’t provide that little rush of “our group is inherently better than outgroups” that columbus does.

 

plus he eventually decided fighting the first nation folks was too expensive/painful to be worth it, and bailed. though he wasn’t trying to full on colonize, just build trade settlements, it’s still a case of The Natives Beat The Colonizers, which isn’t a narrative white-dominated governments are fond of, even today. it encourages certain undigested elements to emit worrying rumbling noises.

 

you could say leif is problematic because capitalism, and because he killed people in skirmishes. but he’s certainly no more of a jerk than any other trader/explorer in the historical record. the great arab and chinese merchant princes were much more greedy and violent on average. it was a violent era.

he kept slaves, but they were (at least to begin with) white; there wasn’t that idea that slaves were less human, or that they deserved to be enslaved, or that it was doing them a favor. they were unlucky and got captured, and now they had to dig latrines, sucks to be them.

whereas columbus was a real dick, and the era of colonialism and slave trading he opened was straight evil.

 

dragging columbus is a nice way to vent steam. the doctor i saw today was a douche.

 

black holes: there were TWO astrophysics named schwartzchild! so much is explained!

 

when hermes thinks it’s food time, he sits quietly by his bowl and waits. he is a tiny miracle.

 

there’s some evidence he went to iceland at one point. he could have heard. but if so he chose to hide his source to prevent competition. a dick move.

 

i have this vague idea that the fundamental cause of war is crowding.

groups of primates get into territory fights, and sometimes somebody even dies. but mostly they just throw sticks and holler. i think hunter gatherer humans were the same way.

but since the dawn of agriculture and city building, the population to land ratio has been too high, and something in our grunty ape souls is telling us we can’t forage enough and we’re going to die unless we shove those other bastards out of our space. of course we know consciously that we don’t forage and everything is copacetic. but on the same deep level where we feel included and accepted if someone plays with our hair, we feel our family is threatened by the mere existence of all these other people. when there’s a fight, because there are so many people involved, it’s out of control from the get go.

the rest is just what happens when you’re constantly driven by an instinct you don’t acknowledge but can’t silence.