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Showing posts from July, 2020

Lazy-Eye as Moonrise Kingdom's Odin.

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There's a tricky exchange in Moonrise Kingdom where precocious Lazy- Eye asks Scout Master Ward what he actually does for a living in order to undermine his authority by questioning his credentials, though it takes 1950s-raised straight-laced Ward a few lines to figure that out. Ward at first responds by saying he teaches math as a profession:  Lazy-Eye: What's your real job, sir?   Scout Master Ward: I'm a math teacher. Lazy-Eye: What grade?   Scout Master Ward: Eighth.   Lazy-Eye: Do you need a PhD for that?   Scout Master Ward: Lazy-Eye, no, but you know what? We're actually in the middle of something here, in case you didn't notice. One of our scouts is missing and that's a crisis. Anybody else? [...] Scout Master Ward [turns to Lazy-Eye]: I'm gonna change my answer, in fact. This is real my job. Scout master, Troop 55. Lazy-Eye's one-eyed-ness could just be a another quirky detail scripted by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola to help distinguish b...

the possible Viking commonwealth of North America's Neo-Iceland.

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There are points where history turns on a dime, that if an event had occurred with only a slight variation, outcomes of things could be radically, and sometimes wonderfully, different. NorsePlay draws your attention to the might-have-been Neo-Iceland of 2172 CE. Historically there was a mass exodus from Iceland in the late 1800s when the population suffered a marked poverty due to a run of bad weather, volcanic activity, and some less-than-attentive Danish rule. The  overflow of indentured workers and welfare resulted in actually offering one-way tickets to the New World. Given the strong & proud tradition of Icelandic citizenry, this was subject to much criticism & debate, but new lands & opportunities were overseas, so thousands left to find better lives for themselves, provided they survived the harsh attrition of a bare bones Atlantic ship crossing and the long unfamiliar trek to potential tracts hundreds of miles away from whichever docks they landed on. ...

hey girl, put down that runebook & coffee so we can NorsePlay together.

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The pictured runebook's titled The Codex Regius: A Reconstruction in Medieval Futhark Runic Script  from Ancient Artifacts and marketed as " this hardbound Codex Regius is specifically designed to be close to what you might find if you were to be directly working with the original sources. " While a book of runes is what one might imagine finding this major source of Norse Lore's Poetic Edda in, this product's manifestation is total NorsePlay. The understandable misunderstanding here's pretty funny as the vellum manuscript source copy's actually written in medieval Old Icelandic using Latin letters in Carolingian-insular script circa ~1270 CE: [page 5 of the  Codex Regius , where Völuspá ends and Hávamál begins! Scan housed at germanicmythology.com.] S ure, the Poetic Edd a's verses are the ur-stories of Norse cosmology and Lore-wise if runes are the first alphabet given to man for writing then it stands to reason that they would use runic , thou...