@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting, yes. I didn’t know that.

No AI being used is really great. However, the same clips shown over and over again and some images being mirrored was quite annoying to me. Also, there were some quite terrible computer animations and sometimes the narration and picture didn’t match at all. Talking about the medieval period and then showing an image from the 18th hundred or so. What the heck?

These production issues made me sceptical pretty much early on. So I quickly crosschecked Wikipedia. But it seems spot on from what I’ve read. Very good. Also, the narrator’s voice was really nice to listen to.

Eels are fascinating creatures. :-)

As feiras medievais são “reconstruções históricas” do que nunca existiu - e ainda assim espalham-se pelo país como momentos de convívio e folia. Em Lamego tem a particular característica de ser promovida como contendo uma recriação histórica das #cortes de Lamego*, ainda que estas nunca tenham existido.

Mas para mim a feira #medieval de #Lamego é aquela altura do ano em que vou até à praça e bebo #hidromel. E quem diz que essa não é uma boa tradição a manter e celebrar? ;-)

• https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortes_de_Lamego

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FOSDEM 2025
I recently attended the large Free and Open Source Software conference
FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. I went there by train, of course,
via Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Cologne. The same route back.

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I lived in the rather expensive, allegedly fancy hotel Le Châtelain in
Brussels. It was really not that fancy, but they had a … ⌘ Read more

The classical book reprinting site is live! LindyPress.net
For a while, I’ve hinted that I’ve been contributing to a project to reprint out-of-print classical and medieval texts that are of hidden value, sometimes even in their original languages. I’ve worked on this project for a while and now it’s live and you can browse the first five books available.

See the site at https://lindypress.net. All works have been reformatted in XeLaTeX so that … ⌘ Read more

Academic

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• Papers and Memories…
  
• The Indo-European Tapes
  
• Video Talks
  
• Audio Talks
  
• Other Presentations
  

Here are some old academic papers that I mostly wrote as term papers and such in graduate school. People occasionally ask out of interest.

By the time I got a year or so into my Ph.D. at Arizona, I had pretty much not intention on continuing in t … ⌘ Read more

We Want Our 4 Causes Back!

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Aristotle, in his Physics argued that there are four causes behind everything that exists. These causes answer the question of “How” or “Why” something is the way it is.

The Material CauseThe material from which something is made. E.g. the stone of a statue.The Efficient CauseThe external force that causes something to be made. E.g. the artisan and his tools who make a statue.The Formal Cause … ⌘ Read more

Medieval people were surprisingly clean (apart from the clergy) | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/medieval-people-were-surprisingly-clean-apart-from-the-clergy

Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files https://gizmodo.com/delete-never-the-digital-hoarders-who-collect-tumblrs-1832900423

The Secret Meanings Behind the Beasts in a Medieval Menagerie - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-bestiary-allegories

The Artful Imperfection of Medieval Manuscript Repair - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-manuscripts-embroidery

The Deep Roots of an … https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/deep-roots-italian-song-sounds-like-english-american-medieval-comedy-nonsense

Getting down and medieval: the sex lives of the Middle … https://aeon.co/essays/getting-down-and-medieval-the-sex-lives-of-the-middle-ages

How to Think Like a Medieval Monk | Lapham’s Quarterly https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/how-think-medieval-monk

How many colours were there in a medieval rainbow? – For the Wynn https://forthewynnblog.wordpress.com/2017/11/20/how-many-colours-were-there-in-a-medieval-rainbow/

The Modern Lives of Medieval Monster Scholars - Atlas Obscura https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mearcstapa-medieval-monster-scholars

The Etymology of ‘Sabbath’ - Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages UCL Calendars in Antiquity and the Middle Ages http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/calendars-ancient-medieval-project/2015/07/15/the-etymology-of-sabbath/

Medieval Scholars Believed in the Possibility of Parallel Universes - Atlas Obscura http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/medieval-multiverse-theory?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2aa8411428-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_06_22&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f36db9c480-2aa8411428-63252673&ct=t(Newsletter_6_22_2017)&mc_cid=2aa8411428&mc_eid=fb147c2f0d