#em is posting about vinland saga

[chiropteracupola]

me when the anime has a cool warp-weighted loom scene...

[appalamutte]

10 Qs for Writers

Thank you so much for the tag @thoughtsofthegirlwiththecurl <3

How many works do you have on AO3? 12 (which includes one anonymous fic)

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What's your total AO3 wordcount? 44,278

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What fandoms do you write for? So far, Check, Please! mostly, though I've written/posted for Attack on Titan, and have various WIPs for both Haikyuu and Vinland Saga! (the Vinland Saga one might be posted soon.......)

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Do you respond to comments? Why or why not? Of course!! I try to respond to every one

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Have you ever had a fic stolen? Thankfully not to my knowledge

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Have you ever co-written a fic before? I haven't

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What's your all-time favorite ship? Damn, that's a tough one. I love too many too much. But, really, I think Daichi/Suga from Haikyuu just barely edges out Jack/Bitty from Check, Please! as my all-time favorite. Despite Zimbits being my favorite dynamic, Daisuga just found me at one of my darkest moments of life and has quickly grown to be my go-to comfort ship

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What are your writing strengths? I'd say imagery and the justifiable overuse of em dashes, but I'm very interested in what others might think!!

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What are you writing weaknesses? Perfectionism. I have the worst habit of editing as I write, because even though it's the first draft, when I read it back I'm reading it as if it were already posted/published. And that then leads me to obsess over every single sentence and phrase, usually before it even leaves my head, and I'll go back and reread what I've already written and rewrite it all, and it slowly dissolves me until I get so overwhelmed and burnt out that I just. Jump ship lol.

It's why all but one of my posted fics are less than 5k words - sometimes I get the burst of inspiration to sit down for 3-4 hours and bust out a quick 1-3k word fic (i.e., I black out and suddenly a fic appears before me), and it's complete enough for me to feel comfortable posting. Those are just so rare to occur, like maybe 2-3 times a year at most

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First fandom you wrote for? God, I want to say either Halo Reach or the Red vs Blue webseries by RoosterTeeth (also Halo Reach, really), but that was so long ago that I don't know if I actually wrote something or dreamed that I did lol. I definitely know that somewhere on my middle-school-assigned Google Drive, there's a half-written World War Z reader-insert fanfic collecting dust haha.

But if we're talking about the first fandom I wrote and completed a fic for, then Attack on Titan.

Tagging (with no pressure): @montrealmadison @doggernaut @parvuls @gordiemeow @a-very-gay-disaster @vitaliskravtsov @starthecozy open tag for anyone else who sees this and wants to do it!!

[emstargazer]

=========ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE=========

Hi, I'm Em(or M or Stargazer)! You also may have known me as Mrd2a. This is my main/personal blog where I talk about and reblog a bunch of stuff regarding video games, animanga, music and the human condition. No side blogs as of the moment. Also reading the intro post isn't a necessary requirement before following.

Main interests:

Video games: RDR2, Ultrakill, Doom, Portal, Half-Life, Persona, Outer Wilds, Control‚ Cyberpunk 2077, Minecraft

Animanga: Berserk, Chainsaw Man, Bleach, Serial Experiments Lain, Vagabond, Oyasumi Punpun, Vinland Saga, Monster

Music(be warned, this category is ever-changing and of volatile nature, so it may become inaccurate over time): video game OSTs of every kind, Aphex Twin, Jack Stauber, Joji, Daft Punk, Nujabes, Masayoshi Takanaka, Molchat Doma, Slayer, Black Sabbath, Linkin Park and umm like dozens more

General: Piracy, media preservation, philosophy, psychology, physics, space

Feel free to DM, ask(no asks with media and promos though), tag, spam like/reblog. Also, if the person writing this interacts with you first have mercy on them they're coming out of their comfort zone here :c .

For my tags, the most important ones are in featured. #em yaps is for my posts and #em hisses is for when I talk about The Horrors™(on the serious note it may often be personal, so blacklist the tag if you're not comfortable with that).

Anything NSFW/suggestive is rare, but if it's art I like it may happen. Swearing and spoilers can be more frequent though.

[kyidyl]

Ok so I wrote this post once and it got eaten before I could finish it and then I started the Vinland arc and I wanted to wait till I finished that before I wrote it because @systlin​ I know I only mentioned the dig in the modern bit, but you’re about to get some Bonus Content (TM).  

Anyway, in AC: Valhalla (AKA: Ass Creed Pillage England) they show a dig in the modern outside of the animus scenes and the question of accuracy came up on Systlin’s stream the other day so here we are.  I even took pictures! Yes, pictures, with my phone, because I play on console and couldn’t figure out how to send myself screenies. I’m going to blame it on covid-related brain cell loss. :P That orange hue is not my phone, it’s the game, it’s a plot thing.  

First up, we have this: 

100% accurate, every dig is contractually obligated to have one of those shitty plastic chairs and at least one person will bring a cloth folding chair (me.  I’m that one person.) to a dig.  

Ok, so here’s a wider shot of the dig: 

Not bad, TBH.  Table for finds, random jumble of equipment, tarp for covering the hole when not in use.  The lights aren’t a thing, but none of us are doing a dig during a world-ending electromagnetic storm either.  I can’t see a spoil heap (the dirt we’ve dug up and screened already), but I wasn’t looking for one.  Usually the stuff won’t be so close to the dig itself, and there’s no screen, but that’s less of a thing in a burial dig so it’s fine.  

Next, a shot of the table with the artefacts on it: 

Again, not bad as far as accuracy goes.  Most people don’t realize this, but archaeologists use trowels MUCH more than pretty much any other tool.  We tend not to use brushes bc they can damage delicate things.  We don’t use hammers, not as far as I’ve seen anyway.  The tools between the brushes and the trowel are accurate, too.  TBH I have no idea what they’re called but they’re basically tiny trowels for really delicate stuff (I used them almost exclusively when I was excavating a kid.).  The state of preservation of the artifacts is also pretty damned accurate, as is the inclusion of a DSLR.  We take lots of pictures.  The tags aren’t accurate, but I’ll get back to that in a hot second.  Also I literally have one of these plastic tables in the basement on which I was doing artefact processing for *months* so like....accurate lol.  

Ok, the dig itself: 

So this is a good place to mention that I’m specifically trained as a bioarchaeologist (even tho I’ve spent more time digging up other stuff.), which means that I specifically am trained to deal with human remains and other biological stuff.  Primarily humans tho.  Excavations of burials and excavations of, for example, a home, are handled very differently.  So you see those stakes with the string? That’s...accurate, but not to a burial.  We don’t need ‘em because you just go to the edges of the burial.  When you don’t do a burial, then you mark the sides of the hole with stakes and string, so they’d also be on the surface not in the pit.  

The partial excavation is accurate, but probably not on purpose by Ubisoft.  See, arch generally try to stick to the philosophy of the most info you can get for the least amount of destruction of the site.  Because Shawn’s goal here is to gain access to Eivor’s body for the animus and not necessarily to lift the body out of the ground, it’s accurate that he hasn’t excavated her entirely.  It’s also possible that ubisoft left the pelvis covered bc the game lets you choose your gender (Yes, I know that sex != gender, but in the context of Ubisoft’s game creation, I could see them obscuring all references to a canon sex OR gender for Eivor.). 

I’m not like an expert or anything on viking burials so I can’t speak to the contents of the burial, but the fact that they included grave goods at all is accurate.  

Another feature here that was interesting to me was the stepped sides of the grave.  Because *that’s how we dig*, lol.  It’s not how we dig burials, because burials are dug in stages (expose the remains, dig around the remains, dig under the remains, and lift the remains out.), but here’s a picture of one of the holes at my current dig: 

Note the string along the top of the hole...

Anyway, the stepped sides shows me that they definitely DID put some effort into designing the dig, but like...it kinda falls into “he’s confused but he’s got the spirit” territory.  

The last comment I have about the dig is about the little tags.  We don’t tag things and label them like that because we take and draw a lot of pictures of the hole and we tag things in the pictures later, not in the hole itself.  However, I think that the tags are a good way of indicating to the audience in the game that Shawn is being meticulous bc it’s not like we’re gonna see his paperwork later.  So there you go...the AC: Valhalla dig through the eyes of an actual archaeologist.  

Now, bonus Vinland content:

THIS IS GONNA CONTAIN SPOILERS FOR AC: VALHALLA.  

For those who don’t know, the Norse visited the Americas several times on several different occasions.  Generally speaking, when their explorations appear in the popular consciousness, they can be divided into two locations: Vinland and L’anse aux Meadows.  Vinland may actually refer to several different settlements and their locations aren’t precisely known (although there are several guesses based on the descriptions in the sagas.), but L’anse aux Meadows is an actual site in Newfoundland that is an active dig (fun fact: one of my profs during my masters spends his summers there sometimes bc a buddy of his is in charge of the dig.) and you can go visit it if you want.  Popularly though people tend to refer to Vinland as one settlement, and its location is unknown.  

So the Vinland saga ends with you getting an apple of Eden from Gorm Kjotveyson when you murder him for being a bastard.  You also see the doorway to an Isu temple that he’s dug up.  Eivor gives this apple to the native people that you trade with over the course of the story.  These people are a local Mohawk tribe.  And, specifically, they are the tribe that protagonist of Assassin’s Creed 3 - Ratonhnhake:ton - is born into.  They guard the apple they get from Eivor and it eventually ends up in  Ratonhnhake:ton ‘s possession.  His dad is a Templar (Haytham Kenway, the son of Edward Kenway - the protag of AC:4 pirates.  Not to be confused with Hytham, the baby Hidden One in AC: Valhalla.), and if I remember correctly Connor is conceived in the temple that Gorm dug up. Anyway regardless, his people still live in the area and because we know where  Ratonhnhake:ton was born, we know where Vinland is within the AC universe.  Turin, New York.  

Turin isn’t coastal, but given AC’s map compression for the sake of gaming and the location of the temple in the far northwest of the Vinland map, it’s close enough.  It’s also within the range of proposed locations for Vinland, so there ya go.  I actually have other interesting stuff about Vinland stories that I know, but this post is stupid long so I’m gonna leave it off, lol.  

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Howard Days, Derleth Christmas Card, Tolkien Society Seminar

Robert E. Howard (Orthosphere): Considering that he died at thirty, Howard’s literary accomplishments can only impress.  Stylistically, he operates at a level many ranks above that of the typical pulp writer.  His vocabulary includes a rich lode of Latin and Greek derivations and likewise of English archaisms.  Brought up, from age thirteen, in the small and isolated Texas town of Cross Plains, in Callahan County, in the middle of the state, Howard almost miraculously overcame a lack of educational resources and acquired a reserve of knowledge in history, literature, myth, and folklore that would shame the modern holder of a college degree in any of those subjects.

Science Fiction (Wasteland & Sky): Ever since the Pulp Revolution started, the main kickback has always been from the older set who think it exists to erase their past when it exists for the exact opposite. The whole reason the movement sprung up was because of those who began looking into the past and were finally discovering what Fandom was actually doing was rewriting and destroying what came before. They were doing it for their own gain, chasing out anyone who wanted what they had mere years earlier.

Gaming (Monster Hunter Nation): I talked about this in the last blog post about the Yard Moose Mountain Mega Shooting Weekend, where I had shooters from all over the country coming to my place for three days of pistol training, about how one night I ran a one off RPG session for 17 of them, and by some miracle it actually turned out good. When this got posted about on Facebook right after, a whole bunch of gamers asked how the hell do you run a game that big and not have it suck, so here’s how we pulled it off.

Tolkien (Breitbart): “The Tolkien Society has announced that the theme of its 2021 Summer Seminar, held July 3 – 4, will be ‘Tolkien and Diversity,’” reports the Daily Wire. Here’s a sampling of what Woketard Tolkien Fanboys  can expect — you know, those whose lives are so empty, this is how they choose to spend a weekend: Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings. Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Antiracism.

Robert E. Howard (Adventures Fantastic): This past weekend was the 2021 Robert E. Howard Days. After last year’s cancellation, it was a much needed gathering. And while many of the regulars weren’t able to attend, the number of first time attendees made up the difference. The gift shop sold out of almost all the books they had in stock.

Awards (DMR Books): John Bullard is a good guy doing Crom’s work over at the Robert E. Howard Foundation (REHF). The other day, John sent me the list of REHF award recipients for 2020 and 2021, which were announced at Howard Days in Cross Plains a week ago. I should note that Corona-chan canceled last year’s Howard Days, so the 2020 awards were handed out this year. Check ’em out below. I’ll post my comments below that.

Fantasy (Goodman Games): Linwood Vrooman Carter was born on June 9th, 1930 in St. Petersburg, Florida. In the august company of his fellow Appendix N authors, Lin Carter is a figure both of high esteem and some controversy. As an editor and critic, he is indispensable, most notably for his role in editing the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS), which ran from 1969-1974 and re-introduced such luminaries as Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, and Clark Ashton Smith to the fantasy-reading public.

Pulp (Pulpfest): Today we celebrate the 125th birthday of TIME magazine’s “dean of science fiction writers,” William Fitzgerald Jenkins — a.k.a. Murray Leinster. An avid inventor who also happened to have a knack for writing wonderful speculative science fiction, his career spanned much of the 20th century.

Fiction (Realms of Night): In the early 1980s, Zebra Books published a four “issue” anthology series bearing the title Weird Tales and the stylized logo familiar to fans of the pulp greats who were published in The Unique Magazine. Weird Tales has been called the magazine that never dies, but most would agree it’s had a largely beleaguered existence since the late 1950s. It has appeared at various times in a newsstand digest format, a full-size traditional magazine format, and — perhaps the most successful post-Golden Era run of the magazine — a very nice perfect bound magazine during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Comic Books (National Review): How can you not know who Neal Adams is? He gave the world the modern Batman and Joker! Revived Green Arrow and the X-Men! Created the first Black superhero for DC, the John Stewart Green Lantern!

Robert E. Howard (Dark Worlds Quarterly): “The Fire of Asshurbanipal” (Weird Tales, December 1936) by Robert E. Howard is the point at which adventure fiction and horror meet. The story was found in a trunk with a note to be sent to Farnsworth Wright in case of the author’s death. This is according to Glenn Lord who published the first version of the story in The Howard Collector #16 (Spring 1972). Lord gives us a little preamble with:

RPG (Modiphius): We’re delighted to announce that Conan The Adventurer arrives in print! This latest sourcebook for the Conan Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of RPG is available now on Modiphius.net and coming soon to a retailer near you. Here are the details on this fascinating new sourcebook which is also available in PDF format on Modiphius.net and DriveThruRPG.com.

Comic Books (Arche-arc): Upon completing my viewing of the FALCON AND WINTER SOLDIER streaming series, I’m moved to comment on some of the parallels between Kevin Feige, founder of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Stan Lee, the founder of Marvel Comics in its crucial sixties incarnation.

Comic Books (Irmonline): I have gone into the first series run of What If? by Marvel from 1977 to 1984, with 47 issues. The title series continues to find numerous use over the years with Marvel. There is a second series that starts in 1989 and ends in 1998, with 115 issues including a #0. After that, Marvel releases a few mini-series, or one-shot stories, that go under the title What If?.

Fiction (DMR Books): I like Vikings, specifically Viking fiction. I certainly have an interest in the history, and the sagas make for dense but fascinating reading, but my first love is pure, heart-pounding adventure. I remember first learning about Vikings back in grade school, when we briefly covered the Viking explorations of the New World, the discovery of Greenland, Vinland and Viking settlements on the Canadian east coast long before that Italian explorer came along and spoiled everything.

Gaming (Game Rant): Skyrim is packed full of references to the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Its last DLC, Dragonborn, saw the inhabitants of the isolated town of Raven Rock fall under a mysterious trance-like state that was leading them to build strange obelisks, with only the faintest memory of doing so. While some The Elder Scrolls quests are full of surface-level Lovecraft allusions like this, the series’ metaphysical lore makes the connection explicit. The same can be said for Obsidian’s upcoming first-person fantasy RPG, Avowed.

Cinema (Talking Pulp): Beyond the Black Rainbow. I really dug Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy, a film that sort of came out of nowhere a few years ago that in some ways, boosted and reignited Nicolas Cage’s acting career. I don’t think that it was long-lasting but his role in Mandy proved that the dude can still bring it and excel when given the right part in a movie. Cosmatos only has one other film and, at this point, it’s already over a decade old. It’s been in my queue since I saw Mandy, however, so I felt like checking it out was long overdue.

Star Wars (Tor): The Star Wars movies are notable for spinning off into a wide variety of other media and related products, including TV shows, books, comic strips, comic books, radio dramas, toys, housewares, and other products. Since the series was largely modeled on the old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, this is no surprise, as both of those properties were also adapted into a variety of formats and merchandise, something George Lucas certainly noticed and emulated. Today, I’m going to look at two of the first Star Wars tie-in books, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and Han Solo at Stars’ End.

Pulp (Fantasy Literature): The Universe Wreckers initially appeared as a three-part serial in the May, June and July 1930 issues of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine, the first publication to dedicate itself solely to science fiction. This legendary magazine started publishing in 1926, the same year that Hamilton’s very first story, “The Monster-God of Mamurth,” appeared in Weird Tales, when its author was 22. The Universe Wreckers would then, sadly, go OOPs (out of prints) for over 80 years, until Haffner Press resurrected it for inclusion in one of its mammoth Hamilton anthologies.

Gaming (Arkhaven Comics): Last month, IGN decided that the hill to die on this week was Palestine.  They printed some article on giving aid to Palestinian Children* that I didn’t care about and didn’t read because I haven’t read anything from IGN for years and I wasn’t starting now.  However, IGN Israel did read it and screamed at the corporate owners. Ziff-Davis roused itself from its dreamy lassitude and made the accurate but surprising decision that this article had nothing whatsoever to do with gaming or popculture and spiked it.

Fiction (Allied Authors): Years ago on this Allied Authors website in “A Derleth Christmas Card,” I touted an unexpected find I made in a local antique store: a series of unique Christmas cards issued by Wisconsin’s famous author — and close friend of Allied Authors — August Derleth. Unexpected, because even in his home state, Derleth’s proverbial backyard, such finds are fewer and farther between, with his fame continuing to grow.

Comic Books (AE Index): An excellent representation of EC original art in an inexpensive format. Along with full-page scans of original art, this features an introduction by Annie Gaines Ashton, exhibit introduction, and twelve short essays or personal recollections from noted EC fans. There are also four double-page enlargements of art, three successful and one blurry. The scans are mostly clear with a few soft or blurry issues.

Review (Rough Edges): There’s no sophomore jinx for the second issue of MEN’S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY. It remains one of the most impressive, beautifully designed publications available today. The theme this time around for this oversized trade paperback is Espionage. It features a lot of vividly reproduced artwork, including both covers and interior illustrations, from a variety of the Men’s Adventure Magazines published in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies, along with seven stories (mostly fiction, even the supposedly true ones) from those magazines.

Cinema (Neotextcorp): When Rhodesian writer Daniel Carney’s unpublished novel The Thin White Line ended up in the hands of producer Euan Lloyd, it fit perfectly with his ambitious plans to make a grand-scale star-studded war adventure film in the vein of Where Eagles Dare. The novel toyed with the rumor about a mysterious 1968 plane landing in Rhodesia allegedly carrying a mercenary force, and when screenwriter Reginald Rose adapted it for film, director Andrew V. McLaglen was hired to bring it to life based on a decisive recommendation from the great John Ford. The cast was loaded with heavy-hitting names such as Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris, Hardy Krüger, Stewart Granger, Jack Watson, Frank Finlay and many others.

Sensor Sweep: Howard Days, Derleth Christmas Card, Tolkien Society Seminar published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/