Have you heard of this series from the British Library? Sounds like you'd really like them: shop.bl.uk/collections/...

Ah, that explains why there are so many disconsolate Brits in town 😅

The Secret History - Donna Tartt (1992)

Hell yeah, congratulations!

I may be biased since I always wrote the body of my essays first, followed by the conclusion, the introduction and finally the title, which is hard to do by hand

Congratulations!

Me too - were doing very similar stuff at the studio i work for so i would have liked to have a chat about it, but i was also exhausted yesterday so i went back to my hostel and accidentally missed most of the afternoon

Yeah, despite going to these events so I can meet up with the little people in my phone, I always forget to do the things that'll actually facilitate that 🫠 next time!

Especially enjoyed @starkholborn.bsky.social's talk on procedural narrative in Shadows of Doubt; a really good introduction to the subject with some fun stories about the peculiar bugs you get from systems driven games

You get a lot of these as euphemisms for the devil too - in danish sometimes people will say "for Søren" instead of "for Satan"

I'm about 200pgs in and it made me think of your Pynchon episode. It seems to be Eco reflecting on the paranoia of the Years of Lead via the Templars/Rosicrucians, from what I've seen of your work I think it'd be up your street (it's also got some very well observed sketches of conspiracy theorists)

I know state justice systems are usually fucked, but there should be a middle ground between them and Hrothgar the Horrid demanding all your sheep because you looked at him funny

But holmgangs were ritualised! You couldn't just take someone out and claim it was fine! I also read somewhere that even the Norse didn't like them so much because they knew that a big horrible bastard could challenge a rich merchant and get some easy money off beating them

To your point about innocent in-group people, I think one of the reasons the Norse stopped resolving every issue with trial by combat was because there were guys who'd challenge people over made-up insults so they could "legally" get them to pay them weregeld

I guess this person is confusing ritualised combat trials (which did exist, but usually got abstracted quite quickly) with just randomly taking out someone who annoyed you a bit