Feats of Nerdiness

Woebot

Well-known member
A twin thread to the feats of autism thread.

Have recently discovered this guy's channel on YouTube.

Absolutely LOVE his passion and dedication and totally unabashed geekery.

Here's two of my favourite videos - both HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Here where he repairs a Wii. MESMERISING.


and here where he tracks down a Japanese version of the Lego Island game. Real shades of digging in the crates.

 

william_kent

Well-known member

Professor Neil Price delivers the first of three fantastic lectures which I've watched multiple times - his geekiness and pompous nature is unmistakable, yet thoroughly engaging. I love it when he credits the Marvel Universe's Thor for providing us with one of the best representations of Yggdrasil, the world tree - it's worth watching all three of these lectures, yet if you're strapped for time then the second of the three lectures in the series which is about the funeral practices of the Norse people is, for me, absolutely essential viewing - total psychodrama in action, butchered corpses arranged like a psycho-sexual killer from a James Ellroy novel or a Sion Sono film has had a hand in the funeral...


"What is going on!" - "Inside this boat are four people and several animals...so everything you see here is very deliberate, nothing about this is random, they haven't just thrown a load of stuff into a boat, and then if we move a midships, the centre of the boat, we find a horse, that's been been treated, ummm, rather unfortunately, it has been decapitated, and also dismembered, so they've taken off its limbs and then they've tried to sort of reassemble it in roughly anatomical position"

Highly recommended, or as Boomkat would say, "check!"
 

catalog

Well-known member
Watched the first two of these now and think I will soon watch the 3rd as well, cos he's left it hanging.

He is a bit pompous as you say, very pleased with himself and when he gets a bit excited and moves his hands about, he's good fun to watch.

I like how hes quite up front about them not knowing a lot about why things happened.

The funeral description is captivating, gets more and more serious, unhinged, disturbing. The part about the slave girl looking over the fabricated doorway into heaven, describing it all.

Then all the stuff with the animals. Plus how he reminds you it was all at night, when they're paralytically drunk, with fires burning.

And I love how the main source material is from an Arab who met them on the Volga in 922 AD. Like finding out that there was a cohort of Central European Roman soldiers very near my house in the 1st century AD.

And he does a good job in the first one of emphasising how all the non-human beings were very much "reality" for the children of the Ash.

Had no idea that viking Myth posited a place called Niflheim, literally "Home of mist". I thought I'd found all references to fog/smoke/mist/haze and then another comes along...
 

william_kent

Well-known member
Watched the first two of these now and think I will soon watch the 3rd as well, cos he's left it hanging.

He is a bit pompous as you say, very pleased with himself and when he gets a bit excited and moves his hands about, he's good fun to watch.

I like how hes quite up front about them not knowing a lot about why things happened.

The funeral description is captivating, gets more and more serious, unhinged, disturbing. The part about the slave girl looking over the fabricated doorway into heaven, describing it all.

Then all the stuff with the animals. Plus how he reminds you it was all at night, when they're paralytically drunk, with fires burning.

And I love how the main source material is from an Arab who met them on the Volga in 922 AD. Like finding out that there was a cohort of Central European Roman soldiers very near my house in the 1st century AD.

And he does a good job in the first one of emphasising how all the non-human beings were very much "reality" for the children of the Ash.

Had no idea that viking Myth posited a place called Niflheim, literally "Home of mist". I thought I'd found all references to fog/smoke/mist/haze and then another comes along...

I'm glad you enjoyed those. He's one of those academics who has taken his nerdy interests to an extreme, basically turned his hobby into a career. I was intrigued by the mention of one of his other interests, "the archeology of the opium trade", I'd love to see him doing a lecture on that. I've been waiting for his book, "The Children of Ash and Elm", to come out in paperback but I gave up and the hardback should be arriving today.
 

catalog

Well-known member
yeah i might get hold of that book at some point too - let me know if it's any good. i actually just finished watching the last one and it's sort of the best of the lot, cos he expands on the 1st and 2nd and takes it somewhere else.

I found myself thinking about how an "old skool jungle set" could be considered a resurrection/engagement with the dead, clubs as temple halls etc. And also the idea of "hauntology" takes on a new and more interesting meaning. This idea that some of these funeral rites might last months or even years.

Also very interesting point about sorceresses and how they were all always women, never men.

I liked that bit about "your luck running out" being Viking in origin, luck as this personified other being within you.

And "Fylgia" for "follower", guardian angel - is that maybe where that publisher "Fulgur" got it from?
 

william_kent

Well-known member
yeah i might get hold of that book at some point too - let me know if it's any good. i actually just finished watching the last one and it's sort of the best of the lot, cos he expands on the 1st and 2nd and takes it somewhere else.

I found myself thinking about how an "old skool jungle set" could be considered a resurrection/engagement with the dead, clubs as temple halls etc. And also the idea of "hauntology" takes on a new and more interesting meaning. This idea that some of these funeral rites might last months or even years.

Also very interesting point about sorceresses and how they were all always women, never men.

I liked that bit about "your luck running out" being Viking in origin, luck as this personified other being within you.

And "Fylgia" for "follower", guardian angel - is that maybe where that publisher "Fulgur" got it from?

I'm hoping to start reading his book tonight and that it will get me back on track with a task I set myself of completing "The Complete Sagas of The Icelanders", a five volume set I bought at the beginning of the year. I've completed the first two volumes, and there have been a few tales of raiding tombs for treasure which involve having a battle with the equivalent of a zombie, the reanimated corpse of the person who is buried there. They have to cut off its head to defeat them. Your comment about "hauntology" seems apt, because it seems as though being shut up in a burial mound isn't the end of the story. In the Sagas there are plenty of examples of the occupants of tombs coming out at night and wreaking havoc.

Some of the main male characters in the Sagas are skilled at using runes for occult purposes, but there seems to be a distinction between that and practice of seiðr ( sorcery ) which is viewed as a woman's art - it seems to be a major insult to accuse a man of using seiðr, and those few that did were shunned.
 

william_kent

Well-known member
I liked that bit about "your luck running out" being Viking in origin, luck as this personified other being within you.

One thing I initially found puzzling about the Icelandic Sagas was why they always want to hang about with the Norwegian king when they first set out on a summer of "raiding", especially because the whole point of settling Iceland was so they weren't under the king's rule, but Jackson Crawford explains it the video below - it's like the king is ultra lucky and some of that luck can rub off if you lig about with him - it's like you get a bonus on your "luck points":

 

catalog

Well-known member
I'm hoping to start reading his book tonight and that it will get me back on track with a task I set myself of completing "The Complete Sagas of The Icelanders", a five volume set I bought at the beginning of the year. I've completed the first two volumes, and there have been a few tales of raiding tombs for treasure which involve having a battle with the equivalent of a zombie, the reanimated corpse of the person who is buried there. They have to cut off its head to defeat them. Your comment about "hauntology" seems apt, because it seems as though being shut up in a burial mound isn't the end of the story. In the Sagas there are plenty of examples of the occupants of tombs coming out at night and wreaking havoc.

Some of the main male characters in the Sagas are skilled at using runes for occult purposes, but there seems to be a distinction between that and practice of seiðr ( sorcery ) which is viewed as a woman's art - it seems to be a major insult to accuse a man of using seiðr, and those few that did were shunned.
yeah, exactly. His own enthusiasm seems to bubble over and he is cautious about seeing too much from what's there, but I think his argument is persuasive ie that the inner mind of a viking had this literal (not metaphorical) connection with the dead going on ie you go through a door, you go visit them, speak to them maybe, give them something, take something.

The recreation of the sorceress and all her kit in instructive in this: she's wearing gold plated clothing, which would shimmer as she moved across the hall (much like girls dressing in club wear?) and she carries henbane seeds which are a powerful hallucinogen. Combine this with all the booze, fire, smoke, the 10 day ceremonies. I mean, it sounds better than Glastonbury to me.

And yeah, he says quite directly that there were men magicians, but it was frowned upon cos it would render them unmanly for their other tasks.
 

catalog

Well-known member
One thing I initially found puzzling about the Icelandic Sagas was why they always want to hang about with the Norwegian king when they first set out on a summer of "raiding", especially because the whole point of settling Iceland was so they weren't under the king's rule, but Jackson Crawford explains it the video below - it's like the king is ultra lucky and some of that luck can rub off if you lig about with him - it's like you get a bonus on your "luck points":

Will check that video - Price says in that 3rd lecture how some people could see that someone else was lucky and would basically not fight them cos they had so much luck. and people were took on voyages specifically cos they'd been tagged as lucky.

Interesting as well how it was all written up, 100s of years later, in Iceland. Ragnarok must've been inspired by the volcanoes in that case (when Price talks about the volcanoes, he even uses a slide of a volcano, where it basically looks like the H bomb going off).
 

catalog

Well-known member
He's one of those academics who has taken his nerdy interests to an extreme, basically turned his hobby into a career. I was intrigued by the mention of one of his other interests, "the archeology of the opium trade"

Lotsa nerdy types who are hidden away in academia should be all over YT.

His other interests all sound really really good don't they. Think they mentioned the archaeology of the holocaust which put me in mind of Eyal Weizman / Forensic Architecture. If you've not already read "Mengele's skull" that's another fascinating feat of nerdery, quick video here

 

william_kent

Well-known member
Not even said anything yet about how all the tombstones on Gotland are serialised comic books!

He packs a lot into those lectures! His enthusiasm has rubbed off on me to such an extent that I've just ordered another book by him , "The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia"...
 

william_kent

Well-known member
His other interests all sound really really good don't they. Think they mentioned the archaeology of the holocaust which put me in mind of Eyal Weizman / Forensic Architecture. If you've not already read "Mengele's skull" that's another fascinating feat of nerdery, quick video here


Some of the superimpositions in that video have the look of a Cenobite straight out of Hellraiser - I had a bit of a flashback to Dead Snow as well...
 
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