It's Friday, December 20 - the last weekend before Xmas or Jule or whatever you wish to call it. I, for now, will call these coming two weeks "holidays" and have my traditional blog hiatus over the festive season.

The next two weeks will be time spent with friends and family, enjoying good food, good company, and good times. There will be cookies and coffee and tea and chocolate and festive meals, there will be walks outside enjoying the fresh air and hours spent at a gaming table inside, too.

2013 was a good year for me, one that I enjoy looking back on - and I wish 2014 to be even better. I hope that your last year was also a good one, and that you can go into the next year with someone close to you.

I will see you on the flip side - regular blogging will resume on January 7, 2014. May we all have good times until then (and after that as well)!

Here you go, have a random-ish link dump!

Things are stirring regarding copyright and distribution issues of papers on academia.edu.

Heritage Daily posts about the Archaeology of Star Wars.

A French café charges extra if you are rude.

I have posted a link to the Portable Antiquities Scheme before; here's a blog with critical thoughts about metal detecting and private collecting of artefacts.

Renaissance paintings go modern photographs - beautiful "re-enactments" done to challenge xenophobia.

Why owls do not a good pet make.

And finally, Rudolphus the Red-Nosed as Gregorian Choral.

This week is the week of parties and getting together with friends and colleagues and former colleagues to eat and drink and enjoy the season. The Most Patient Husband of them all has time off already, so I sneak in some work (a few last things need doing before the holidays) and join him some in relaxing and just hanging out. A few days more, and it will be family time for us, and we're both looking forward to that.

The weather is not very christmassy, too warm and snowless, but I don't really mind. We're having the presents all lined up, the cookies have all been baked, and it's nice to have a gingerbread and a cup of coffee and just relax.

And in the spirit of things you always do before Xmas or Jul or however you want to call it, here's Arkikon's Julekort 2013. (Arkikon is a Norwegian company specialising in graphical reconstructions, so their season's greetings are worth seeing - if you go on their homepage, you can also have a look at those of years past.)

Plus the obligatory music bit - this year in German, brought to me by a friend's blog entry, and an incredible earworm:

This weekend, a friend told me about research into historic sleep patterns - seems like not only do we modern people sleep less than we would need to as a basic tendency, but also differently.

Research points at two sleep phases, with a time of quiet-ish activity in between, being the usual thing a few centuries ago, before electric lights were common and turned the night into day. Are you curious instead of sleepy now?

Here's an article on a website called slumberwise, BBC newsmag tells us about the myth of the eight-hour sleep, and some guy I've never heard of before gave it a try.

This, I think, is very cool - and a brilliant example on how things change, and stuff will seem strange to our modern western culture is what was so normal it wasn't even worth mentioning a few hundred years ago.

Yesterday I read about flour - especially bleached flour. Which was sorta new to me, bleached flour, erm - that stuff is almost white anyways?

Turns out that flour is actually getting bleached at least in the US, with stuff that I would not necessarily want close to my food thankyouverymuch. (In Germany, bleaching flour was banned in the 1950s. Thank you, Germany. Sometimes your rules are nice.)

With that still freshly in the back of my mind, I was not happy about hearing of TTIP this morning, brought to me by an email about a petition against it. Similarly to the ACTA thing of a while ago, now corporations and politicians want to make a secret trade agreement thingie that will allow them to do wild things to "non-tariff barriers to trade". Which is, basically, the rules about things like which food is ok to sell and which is not, thankyouverymuch. Or data security stuff.

The US folks, it seems, are afraid that such an agreement will make them have stricter rules for their markets. Others are more forthrightly declaring it's a bad idea - a betrayal of the public. It would also give companies the possibility to sue against laws that cut their profit due to some insignificant things such as, for example, banning the bleaching of flour. (Lawsuits like that have actually already happened. This is... wow.) Democracy, who needs that?

So, I don't care on which side you are standing - US or EU, I think it's not a good thing for those who don't happen to be in the saddle of one of the huge companies. If you agree (which I hope you do), please sign one of the petitions against it:
this one at Sum of Us or this one from Campact (German-Language, but you will manage, I'm sure).
Or both, for good measure.

Since it looks like there will be a meeting concerning the agreement on Monday, there's not so much time left - so if you can, please spread the word about it, too!

These days, I get the feeling that in the middle of all the seasonal preparations, I am hunting for some elusive stuff all the time. Elusive stuff as in "that's how it was in the Middle Ages".

So high on today's list of things to do: counting threads from fabric samples and trying to decide if some of them will do as 14th century fabric replicas.

This is weird, and exhilarating, and interesting in a way that fabric samples probably should not be. Out comes the little USB microscope now. Threads, I will count on you!

Not all of the current hunts are as difficult, though - there has been some progress, and I hope to have suitable light for taking decent photos later today, so I can share my findings with you.

Until then, here is a truly breathtaking video that has nothing to do with historical textiles - but a lot with going for what you want to go for, and never mind conventions and naysayers.



This video left me totally boggled. It's... wow. Just... wow.

I am back from taking my breather - just like every year, we went to the Spiel in Essen together with a bunch of friends. That is a fair all about boardgames, and we spent the days there looking at an enormous amount of games, checking out the rules of lots of them, having a still impressive number explained to us and played a few (at least for a few rounds, so we could get a feel for it). For example, we got to try out "Firefly - the game". If you just look at the game mechanics, it's a fairly simple merchant simulation with lots of bad things that can happen to your ship and your crew... but the game manages to catch the spirit of the series really beautifully.

We all managed to escape without con-crud (in this case, we non-lovingly term it the "Essen-Pest", the plague of Essen). We did, of course, not escape without games - there was an expansion out for "Flashpoint", which we currently play a lot. I also consumed way too much chocolatey stuff (if that is possible at all, that is).

If you are tempted now to go to the Spiel yourself one day, boardgamegeek.com has an Essen FAQ here. I am quite exhausted, gaming-wise, after the four days of the show and the drive home, but I absolutely love it. It really is an experience!