Last year, I do not remember how or through what, I stumbled across a flash "yulekort" (Xmas-Card) from a Norwegian company called Arkikon. Their job is to take archaeological facts and make them understandable for the public by supplying films or photographs. So it's no wonder that they had a little flash yulekort - and I did enjoy that one so much that I actually bookmarked it, and it's still bookmarked.

And this year, true to expectations, they have a new one. Go check it out - it's quite tongue-in-cheek, I think (and nice even if neither the archaeological excavation nor the reconstruction are portrayed correctly). And if you don't know it yet, go see last year's card as well (it's still my personal favourite).

Working with a laptop is very nice - it has internal batteries so you can work even if there's no electricity (at least for a while), you can easily take it with you, it takes up little space on the desk even when set up, and there's probably a dozen more reasons. However, laptops also have their little drawbacks - like, for example, that it is not always possible to do an upgrade, or repair something. And probably everybody who has been using a laptop for a while has stumbled across one or more laptop-related problems already.

So... I stumbled over this instruction on how to clean a laptop fan yesterday, and it made me laugh really hard - so I'm passing it on.

Here you go. Clean the fan (or don't).

A while ago, I stumbled over a video linked on Wormspit's blog, and I'll finally share it with you today. It's kind of fun, though it is also kind of... not really realistic.



There are quite a lot of bits in that film that I would like to see for much longer, and in much more detail, and some things are really not convincing me - like the berry-crushing (for that red? berries? Ah, come on.) or the thickness of the cloth he handles when washing and the fall and drape of the finished curtains. Still, I find this amusing - I don't even know who that Conan is, to be honest, but I can totally get fingering good-quality plant-dyed silk in a luscious red. And a film that shows passion about textile crafts... can it be all bad?

Though somehow this week went by fast, I'm still happy that it is Friday already and thus a weekend coming up. I feel the winter now, the cold and the long dark hours, and that somehow saps me of a good amount of energy at the moment so that I have a tendency to feeling tired and listless. The daylight spectrum lamps do help, as do generous amounts of tea and chocolate, but it's still a bit of a drag, and requires more self-ass-kicking than usual.

It's curious somehow that the body does this. And it is, to me, even curiouser somehow that I know it's due to different chemistry levels in the brain, and I can even actually pinpoint the effects this winter weather and winter darkness has on me - a negative thought popping up where usually I'd be optimistic, for example, or falling asleep after dinner - and for all that knowledge that it's just the winter darkness, it will still be an influence. No "I disbelieve this illusion" possible here, unfortunately!

And why on earth is winter still having that effect on people? I mean humans have been living in this area of Europe for how long now? Millenia? And still we haven't adapted properly to the shorter daylight hours and longer nights in wintertime? Oh come on, evolution!

Thank you all for your congratulations and good wishes!

We had a wonderful time on Saturday with both our families and lots of friends - and of course (as is typical for a wedding in Franconia) lots and lots of good food. And now we are slowly getting used to normal life again (and maybe even to the consumption of cake now and then - never in my life have I had such a cake overload before). It's astonishingly unfamiliar to be wife and husband now, something new added to our life together now after quite a few years of "wilder Ehe" as it is called in German. And we're also recovering from the total frenzy of the days and weeks before and the day itself (which to me felt like about five days rolled into one, it was so intensive).

And now I can actually say "my husband" when talking about the Most Patient Man of Them All. That's bound to occasionally make a conversation easier - or at least less lengthy...

I stumbled over a batch of nice links recently, and I'm finally sharing them with you:

The Anjou Bible is fully digitalised and online - you can see it here. The Book Viewer is in Dutch, but the icons' functions are very, very obvious, so you should have no problem looking at the pictures.

I also stumbled across a site called Decameron Web with an article about sexual positions in the Middle Ages. There's also a lot of other resources and information about the Decameron there, including an Italian and English version of the text.


And finally, there's an interesting non-medieval project going on: An artist called Christopher Salmon is on the quest for money to make a short film from Neil Gaiman's short story "The Price". The text will be read by Neil Gaiman himself, and there's stunning artwork in graphic-novel-style going with it.



If you like the teaser and want to support it, you can pledge money (starting from 10 Dollars) to the project. The money will only be deducted from your account if enough supporters can be found - the film is budgeted at 150.000 USD, and there's yet a ways to go until that amount is reached.

... just more of the same work: Filling in the figures, attaching arms and legs, and preparing for the garment cutting and things.

And while I'm working, you can share the Ohrwurm that I had all day yesterday. An Ohrwurm is a piece or snippet of music that gets stuck in your head and you hear it over and over again - which might be annoying if you only know a very short snippet. (By the way, the literal translation - earworm - seems to make its way into English language.)
Fortunately for me, yesterday's Ohrwurm was more than a snippet, I didn't mind it at all, and I made things even better by finding this karaoke-subtitled version of it on Youtube:



Enjoy!