A friend recently told me she now has Windows 10 - which she didn't want. It did not care for her wants or wishes, however; it just went ahead and installed itself.

If you're running Windows and would like to avoid the same thing happening, you can use the GWX stopper tool - explanations and download link can be found here.

If you're guessing now that I am using this thing, you're completely right - I would like to decide myself when to change operating system, thankyouverymuch!

Aarhus University Press has a long list of books in their catalogue, and they include Else Oestergaard's "Woven into the Earth", the wonderful book about the garment finds from Greenland. They also have a monthly campaign of one e-book that they post on their site, downloadable for free.

Guess what this month's ebook is? Right - Woven into the Earth. Go here to download it, and feel free to spread the word. The book is absolutely wonderful and a must-have if you are interested in medieval garments. (h/t to Christa, who found this first.)

Other delightful news - the open-air museum village in Düppel, where I went to give a presentation this summer, has won a cultural award given out by Berlin. Congratulations!

There's a stack of lovely links to share with you, so you're not getting an "Old Knitting" post today (wait for tomorrow, though...)

Instead, here is other stuff I hope you'll enjoy:

Uppsala University has a new database called "Gender and Work", where you can search and find different sources regarding, well, gender and work. While the title sounds very international, it looks like the database interface and the base itself are Swedish only. Still, if you are looking for sources and can read Swedish, this might be a lovely tool for you.

The next one is definitely in English. I know this, because I have helped making it myself... as you might know, I am a fan of the wonderful Escape Pod, so when I met with Alasdair at LonCon, I volunteered, spur-of-the-moment, to be one of their narrators. Well, though my first story is not for Escape Pod, but for Cast of Wonders (which is a YA podcast, soon to be part of the Escape Artists flock), I'm very excited that it is live now. You can listen to me narrate "Fairy Bones" by Guy Stewart here. (My voice is a little nicer usually, those were the last dregs of the Cold of Doom that had me in its claws for a while.)

If you read German and are interested in material culture of the Middle Ages Roman Age, there's an interesting (and textile-/clothing-related) article at Archaeologik, titled "Von Menschen und Kapuzenmänteln oder Wie kommuniziert eine Gesellschaft mit Alltagsgegenständen?".

You prefer more English? Here you go. There's a long poem listing an incredible amount of weird pronounciation rules (or exceptions) in English, called, fittingly, "Chaos". Sometimes, people attempt to read it, and here's one of the many youtube videos of it:


In final news, I'm hard at work getting the new European Textile Forum pages finished and online. I've kept records of how the old pages did look (which included the programmes, well, at least mostly!) but there was no real, proper archive. This will change now for the better, and it will also make administration and preparation of the Forum easier for me in the future (at least I hope so).

The website redesign is finally all done and finished. There's a few more articles I'd like to add to the main page, but they are not time-critical - and the rest is all done. The menu structures are fine, all the links seem to be working, and a few of the remaining tweaks and checks can only be done once the site is connected.

I've tried hard not to waste too much time on small things, but then sometimes it's the small things that make all the difference. So now and again, I spent a few hours trying to get something to work because it would be oh so pretty, or oh so cool. A good bunch of hours was also used up because I had to learn something new - how to handle css stuff, or how I have to build the menu structure in Joomla! for my breadcrumbs to work properly, or how to size and position an svg grapic. (SVGs are cool. They are vector graphics that you can have your browser draw, so they are nice and nifty and resize very, very well. If you know how to resize them - so in case you need somebody to explain it to you, too, here's a wonderful blogpost about it.)

So tomorrow will be the day - I'll take the old shop offline, migrate the data to the lovely new shop, and then ask for the connection to be made. That will probably take between a few hours to a day or even two, depending on how fast the name-servers catch the update. This is all very, very exciting, and I hope it will all go well!

I'm happy to announce the first post of our blog tour, over at the Travelling History blog. Gillian and I went through our photo archives for this one, and we hope you'll enjoy the pictures.

Our book was also mentioned in an article in the Western Telegraph, along with several other books about the Middle Ages.

Let's stay book-related - there's an open access ebook about words and language called Medieval Hackers. If you're interested in language and history of words and wording, give it a look.

And still staying with books, though from a slightly different angle, I found this article about the Kubler-Ross Model of Grief Associated with Editing and Rewriting utterly hilarious. And oh so true! I remember that time my phd thesis draft got completely pulled apart, resulting in a huge re-write and some re-ordering. I was devastated, and annoyed, and then even more annoyed (but differently) when I realised that all the criticism was, indeed, valid points and the book could be so much better if I did those edits. Similar things happened in other areas - I've done layouting and thought that my choice of fonts was fine, until someone came along and told me "I'd rather recommend that". Well, what shall I say? He was utterly right.

The good thing about getting edits, and getting over it - after the first few times of running through the phases, it gets easier and easier to take that deep breath and think "well, I'll just try the recommended edit on for size, I can always change it back if it's not better than it is now". (Not surprisingly, it usually was better after the change my editors suggested. I'm a lucky one to have had these editors!)

In Beast News, our blogtour is supposed to start today, but with the time shifts, it might not be my today (so you'll be getting the link tomorrow, if all goes well). We do have our first two reviews at Amazon, though, to our great delight, and three more over at Goodreads!

(Reviews really help selling books, so if you like a book and would like to help the authors sell more of it, you can do so by writing and posting a review. Amazon is an obvious place for this, as lots of people check there for reviews even if they buy in brick-and-mortar or at different online shops; goodreads is another good place, but anywhere on the internet will help your favourite author to do better.)

More book-related stuff? Here you go. The book from Jutta Zander-Seidel, "Textiler Hausrat" has been digitised and is available for free at ART-Dok, together with several other titles by Zander-Seidel. (Hat tip to Nicole Kipar from kipar.org, which is a blog you might want to follow as well.)

And now I have some non-work-related stuff for you. Games! Games we played at Essen! Not all of them, mind you - just a few.

Before you read my comments, you should probably know that I tend to be quite critical of games. We've been doing this go-to-Essen-thing for years now, playing oodles of games, and we (that is me and my friends who usually roam the halls together with me and the Most Patient Husband of Them All) have developed quite a good sense for what games we prefer. So we'll often take just a look at a game and go "meh", not necessarily because it is a bad game, but not a type we like. (Those preferences are different for each of our group, but they overlap for a good part, which makes roaming together so pleasant.)

There's so many games out there, and so many new ones coming out each year, that you can either set apart a huge amount of space for all those games you get, or you restrict the amount you're getting. We try to go for option 2, so if we buy a game, it has to really please us and offer a good amount of replayability. We tend to gravitate towards games that are (relatively) quick to explain but still want some brains when playing; with a luck factor involved (so no hardcore strategical/tactical games). We also have a thing for cooperative games and racing games. And now that you know how to put my comments into context, here we go!


We started out with a round of Marvel Dice Masters - which was fun. It's a light game, lots of dice, though some of the rules were not completely clear. We already have several copies of King of Tokyo in our circle of friends, so we really don't need this game. I'd play it again though, happily.



The Witcher. I don't know the video game, but I can tell you that the boardgame is repetitive and boring. Boring and repetitive. Oh, did I mention repetitive? So many tasks to fulfill. Joyless combat. Everyone playing for themselves. We broke off after (or in, I don't remember) the second round of this. Boooooring. (You see the timer attached to the stand? We'd have had 31 more minutes to waste on this game - everyone gets an hour to testplay. Which tells you we spent 29 minutes on this. Which was more than enough.)



This game was called Bastion (as the English rulebook on the table tells you), it was a cooperative game, and we didn't expect much from it. The coloured cubes are the resources you need to collect in order to battle monsters that approach your city gates - you spend one of any colour to get three of the colour marked on the board. Once there are cubes on the segment, you can remove all of them (up to three) by placing a cube on the inner wall, and you can clear all the cubes off the inner wall by hopping inside. A monster you smashed gives you a bonus for smashing another monster, or for movement. The monsters always jump to the next free spot, and when the monster deck is used up, they leapfrog forwards; the very last monster jumps directly to the city gate and you have to smash it there at once. There's not too much luck involved, it is easy to explain and it does require you to think and plan ahead with your mates - we really liked it! Bastion would make a very nice gateway game, and it looks like you can up the difficulty quite a bit with stronger monster cards (that are included).


Crazy Time. You have a stack of cards and flip them over; each of them shows a clock face with a time. You count the time upwards, starting with "one", next player flips a card and says "two", next one flips and says "three"... unless there's a time machine, when you have to count backwards. Or there's a new rule that gets introduced. Fun twist? One of the players does not know the new rule and has to guess it (or gets lots of cards for making mistakes!). Original rules let the winner of a round choose who does not get to see the rules cards; I'd recommend as house rule:  winner of the round does not get to see the rules cards (for a bit of a rubber-band effect). Lovely little game. Quick to explain, quick to get started with, but a really nasty brain teaser.


This was another co-op: Space Cadets - Away Mission. Lots of plastic minis, lots of tiles, different scenarios, different aliens, space in the flavour of 1960s sci-fi. Oh, and girly-glittery dice. We really enjoyed this. Actually, we enjoyed this so much that we bought it. (Our excuse? Well, apart from you don't need an excuse to buy a game you really love apart from "we really loved this", our excuse is that we did not have any space-themed co-op games yet. Also, the minis include brain-in-a-jar figures, and everyone knows you can always use more brains.)

And this is... Lanterns. You place one of your three tiles and each of the four players gets a lantern card in the colour facing them. If you place matching colours, you also get bonus cards. On your next turn, you can exchange colour combinations for tiles with victory points. It's a relatively light game, with an interesting concept - however, luck obviously plays a big part. (Frieder suffered from always just missing the higher value numbers on the victory point tiles, for instance.) We played the "short fair version" with about half the available tiles and already found it too long. Add some players in there that tend towards analysis-paralysis (huh, if I place that tile like this, he gets a green and player 3 gets a yellow and then they have a full set but if I place it like this I don't get a bonus... hm... let me look at my other two tiles... if I place this one like this, ah, or maybe here, or...) and you're in for a really, really tedious game. No thanks.

And that's it for today. If you enjoyed that, let me know - I have a few more games I could tell you about...

Today was work interspersed with liberal amounts of tea, cookies, and naps. Naps are a wonderful thing (and cats are very helpful with napping, always giving a perfect example of how it's done).

Who, me? As if I'd ever take an extra nap. Ever.

With the US release of The Middle Ages Unlocked coming up, Gillian and I will do another blog tour, so the past days have included writing for this. The first posts are already sent off to their hosts. We got a few more interviews this time around, which is lovely - we really did enjoy answering the questions! Watch this space for the tour announcements.

I also stumbled across a website called biblehub when writing one of my posts - you might be interested about what the Bible has to say about spinning, too. I wouldn't necessarily believe all the things the Standard Bible Encyclopaedia has to say, though!

Meanwhile, as a remainder of our last blog tour and to get you into the mood for the next one, here's a post about medieval textiles at the History Vault.

If you read German, here's a highly amusing post about the replacement for a lost knife. (If you don't read German, the piccies are still nice to look at, in case you enjoy looking at medieval knife reconstructions.)