Amidst the corona virus pandemic, there is considerable evidence pointing towards the existence of a second century woman, who came to be believed to be the patron saint against plagues and epidemics. Her name? Saint Corona. This blog post explores some of the traces of this intriguing female saint.
For an article on sickness/health/immortality in fan fiction about Alfred the Great, I am currently close reading this very interesting piece by Tumblr user BigHeartBigFart, which combines characters from The Last Kingdom and Outlander. Republished with the author’s permission.
Saturday night fever with my (equally nerdy and geeky) friends: from Amsterdam Central Station we take the ferry to visit a non-rectilinear polygon with spectacular large overhangs. Is it a boat? An iceberg? A huge sculpture of a seagull? Nope, it’s the film museum, called EYE and located on the other side of the equal-sounding lake, het IJ. Designed by Viennese architects association Delugan Meissl (famed for their work on the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart), the white and oddly shaped museum houses a museum, exhibitions, cinemas, a restaurant, and extensive (vintage) film-related collections. Next to its permanent display about the history of filmmaking, this autumn, EYE presents an exhibition and film programme on the oeuvre of a director who is not only among Russia’s most influential filmmakers but widely regarded as one of cinema’s godfathers: Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986).
As you can imagine, the transmedial storytelling around Wiedźmin [The Witcher] combines many of my interests. Therefore, one of my resolutions for 2020 is to contribute to this phenomenon by means of a new translation (from Polish to English). Every month, I translate one of the short stories from the collection Ostatnie życzenie (The Last Wish) by Andrzej Sapkowski. This is my work from March – with many thanks to my teacher Sławomir! Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the philosophical discourse concerning good and evil seems to be subsumed into three major areas; meta-ethics which describes the nature of good and bad, normative ethics concerning how human beings ought to behave and applied ethics which attends to particular moral issues. All three of the above concepts find expression in the network television landscape, most explicitly through the Netflix sitcom The Good Place.
From September 2018 to February 2019, the famous Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosted ‘Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt’, a major exhibition on contemporary video game design and culture. Announced as “a unique insight into the design process behind a selection of groundbreaking contemporary videogames”, this immersive exhibition was the end presentation of a project that took four years to undertake. I went over the Channel to take a look and write down my experiences for the first issue of the Journal of Sound and Music in Games.
Last week was a regular and normal week for me. I had my rehearsals, my work at the library, my trainings, a meeting for the Phd. I went out with friends, had a party where I shared glasses and cutlery, grappled with my senpai & kohai, hugged with sensei. But we live in a different world now. A world in which we are told to “maintain social distancing” to “flatten the curve”. This change of routine is unpleasant for me, as I am attached to my schedule, my structure. But being at home is no problem at all, on the contrary, my home is my castle, an Aspergirls’ Paradise. I do not often claim that I am particularly good at something, however, I am really good at enjoying myself at home alone. And with this post, I hope to share some tips for this, so that you can become really good at it as well, for I believe that it is important that we stay happy + healthy in times of Corona. Take care! <3
A ‘90’s schoolyard, somewhere in Suburbia. The children are happily playing soccer, with their teachers as referees. But one chubby girl sits aside. She is not joining at all, not even looking. She is playing with a stick, quite monotonously and repetitively trying to draw perfect straight lines in the air. “You see, we just cannot have her join…” – the teacher explained to the girl’s father. “She doesn’t understand the rules and will just try to get the ball in order to bounce it and roll around with it, refusing to let go. Then of course, the other children will get annoyed and start kicking her. So that is why we as teachers decided that she should be on the side, so that the other kids can enjoy their game.” The father shrugged. “Well, if she likes to play with that stick, let her do so.” The chubby girl pretended not to have overheard this conversation and continued her stick play, striking and cutting through the air, imagining herself to be fighting alongside Xena Warrior Princess, or as the fourth Samurai Pizza Cat or the fifth Ninja Turtle.
For living on this planet, I pay “rent” – I contribute to the world with my music, my research, my arts+crafts, my love & friendship, and my writing. Although my name literally means “Little Warrior”, due to my autism, I cannot join my friends on the barricades. Therefore, I raise my voice through my own – soft & quiet – forms of resistance, to empower the misfits. On my blog and for BiWomenQuarterly, I write academic essays, auti-ethnographies and various forms of poetry, such as #biku . This piece tells more about the traditions of poetry in which I place myself, to conclude with a short poem about the current situation in Poland – where the Prides meet many prejudices, and where dehumanizing language is dehumanizing us.
As you can imagine, the transmedial storytelling around Wiedźmin [The Witcher] combines many of my interests. Therefore, one of my resolutions for 2020 is to contribute to this phenomenon by means of a new translation (from Polish to English). Every month, I translate one of the short stories from the collection Ostatnie życzenie (The Last Wish) by Andrzej Sapkowski. This was my work from February. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.
