lay me gently in the cold dark earth

When I was a freshmen I had this professor that was really laid back but one day the guy next to me kept talking to me and my professor said “Mallaidh Anne, if you can’t be quiet, I’ll have to move you,” and even though I was 22 I suddenly felt like I was 13. I was MORTIFIED so I didn’t even try to defend myself, I just held Very Still and told my classmate to Shut Up.

Minutes later, the same classmate spilled his Gatorade everywhere, and it caused a Ruckus, and my professor said “Mallaidh Anne, move.”

And I got so Overwhelmed by the Injustice of it all, I got possessed or something. I said FIRST of all, I didn’t spill that, SECOND OF ALL, it wasnt even me TALKING before.

And he said “what, no third point?”

And since I was fucking possessed, I said “yeah, my hair looks great today and I’m extremely cute.”

And he just looked at me for an excrutiatingly long moment and I knew I couldn’t flinch, and then he nodded and went back to teaching. It took me the rest of the class to recover both emotionally and physically.

In the stables of Rohan, there is an unruly horse named Brego. This horse is so wild that even the horse-masters of Rohan can’t tame him. He’s just a lost cause, they say. “There’s nothing you can do– leave him,” they say.

BUT THEN ARAGORN COMES IN. And like the heroine of a Horse Movie™ he’s all: “You just don’t UNDERSTAND the horse! The horse is wild and rebellious and free– like me!” 

Aragorn begins gently talking to the horse, first in Rohirric, then in Elvish. He calms him down and asks him what’s wrong.

You could easily draw a parallel between Aragorn and Brego’s “rebelliousness.”  To Theoden, Aragorn was acting overly unruly and difficult.  “When last I looked, Theoden, not Aragorn, was King of Rohan.” Then Brego acts unruly and difficult – and Aragorn’s like “the people of Rohan just don’t understand you!!!!!!”

And then Eowyn explains that Brego used to belong to Theodred.

Suddenly Brego’s unruliness IS completely understandable— his master was killed in battle.  He’s a horse with a Tragic Backstory.

“Your name is kingly,” Aragorn tells the horse. Aragorn is also a king. Aragorn is projecting. 

Now that she’s explained the horse’s tragic backstory, Eowyn tries to get Aragorn to open up about his own Tragic Backstory™. (”I have heard of the magic of elves, but I did not look for it in a Ranger from the north….?”) She fails. Aragorn is briefly like “yup I was raised by elves,” does not elaborate, and then peaces out.

But as he leaves Aragorn dramatically says: “turn this fellow free; he has seen enough of war.”  

And Eowyn is forced to wonder whether Aragorn is talking about the horse….or about himself….

Then Aragorn has a Near-Death-Experience, but Arwen’s elven-magic (just roll with it) saves him. And the horse who comes to carry him to safety is none other than Brego.

It’s Brego, repaying the kindness and understanding Aragorn showed him earlier in the film! 

 Aragorn set Brego free, and in return Brego saves Aragorn’s life!

 Because they UNDERSTAND each other, as fellow free spirits who “have seen too much of war.”  Both of them are KINGLY but also WILD, they’ve lived through too much and lost people they cared about, and their strong wills cannot be tamed by anyone in Rohan!

 It’s beautiful. Aragorn canonically has Disney-Princess-level animal friendship powers. 

When they arrive at Helm’s Deep, Aragorn smiles and earnestly says in Elvish:  “thank you Brego, my friend.” And we know that Brego understands….

My technique in sewing medieval clothes without a paper pattern is a little involved, but I like being able to make a garment and have it fit perfectly the first time I put it on, without having to do a fitting even one time.

How do I do this? Two programs - MakeHuman and Marvelous Designer

- I made a perfect 3D model of myself in MakeHuman by using my measurements and height, following this tutorial

- I imported the creepily perfect 3D model of myself into Marvelous Designer.

- I took medieval patterns from the internet, traced them, and resized them to fit the perfect 3D model of me. Like this t-tunic.

or more complicated clothes:

- Cut out the fabric using the same dimensions, adding a seam allowance

- sew it together (correctly the first time, not wasting fabric)

The first time I made a t-tunic, it went over my head and fit perfectly. I made a t-tunic for my brother using this technique, and he didn’t have to be involved in the process at all except for putting it over his head and it fitting perfectly. 

The hard part would be cutting out the fabric for more complicated clothes, but with ancient/custom clothing like this, you’d have to find a way to do that anyway. With this program, you know at least that it’s going to fit your beautiful body, and there’s less chance of wasting expensive linen..

“There would have been no Viking Age without textiles,” says archaeologist Eva Andersson Strand, director of the Centre for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen, in old Viking territory.

Yet textiles have not received much attention from archaeologists until recently. Andersson Strand is part of a new wave of researchers — mostly women themselves — who think that the fabrics in which people wrapped their bodies, their babies and their dead were just as important as the clay pots in which people preserved food, or the arrowheads with which hunters took down prey.

Oh buddy, let me tell you about the Debert-Belmont PaleoIndian (Sa’qewe’l L’nu’k) Site Complex.

It was first identified in 1948 and partially excavated in the 1960s. The site is deposited in what we refer to as a massive sand event, and it’s the reason why in Nova Scotia we sometimes dig sites to “Debert Standards” (meaning we must dig shovel tests to 1.2m deep and then continue by hand-augering if we haven’t hit glacial till or a refusal on bedrock).

Debert is among the oldest and arguably the most significant sites in North America, and it includes both primary contexts (original sites that were buried including hearths and other elements of habitation sites) and secondary contexts (sites/objects that may have washed down from higher ground, making predictive modelling very difficult and necessitating very thorough shovel testing). Radiocarbon dating places this site at minimum 11,000 years old, and most local archaeologists agree it’s probably more like 13,000 years old.

(Above is from the report of the awesome geologist Ralph Stea - http://www.steasurficial.ca/pdf/dbsite.pdf)

The site is known for some very distinctive and very ancient artifact types, such as fluted points, and it seems that the area was a seasonal encampment site for early big game hunters - Nova Scotia had a lot of very large animals at that time, which was around the close of the last ice age.

Other signs of very ancient sites have been identified in Nova Scotia, but Debert is definitely the most complete and well-documented - most of the other material in Nova Scotia have been tantalizing isolated finds instead of in situ sites. Sometimes scallop draggers in the Bay of Fundy will kick up a stone ulu, since millennia ago the Bay was dry land, and the knives are about the right size and shape to be caught by something designed to bring up scallops.

Debert, and First Nations sites in general, are very much not my specialty - I’m an industrial archaeologist and a buildings archaeologist, but as a consultant I need to know a little about every archaeological period in NS as I might be called to work on any of them. So, I’ll leave you with this link for some more detailed info:

http://www.mikmaweydebert.ca/home/ancestors-live-here/debert/understanding-and-protecting-the-sites/

We have. Repeatedly. They don’t care, because it’s not about the word, it’s about the fact that ruling out an inclusive word means they can push people to use words which allow them to determine if you’re ‘in or out,’ as per the fucking ani difranco song from like 25 fucking years ago.

“Oh, you’re bisexual? Can’t use these words, can’t do this.”

“Oh, you’re asexual? You don’t belong.”

“Oh, you’re a lesbian? You must conform to this or you’re a bad lesbian.”

“Oh, you’re trans? You’re not the right kind of trans. Also we hate you.”

That’s what this is all about. If someone says ‘I’m queer,’ that doesn’t give exclusionists enough to know whether or not they hate that person, so they hate the term. 

Like, all of those platforms were still profitable...massively profitable before they had targeted ads on your feed and unskippable ads before videos. They didn’t need to bring them in. They weren’t going to go under, their CEOs weren’t living in the backseats of their cars, they were living in mansions already. They just wanted more money.