Category: blog

This personal archive of Musings (aka my weblog) functions as a database for interesting fanfiction I came across, as well as for my own work on (among other things) autism, bisexuality, fan studies, King Alfred of Wessex, mermaids, music & (ludo)musicology, martial arts, (neuro)psychology, video games, the medium formerly known as TV, and random nerdiness. I hope that you’ll enjoy browsing through my Musings (Blog).

An Azeri story about the cyclops Tepegoz, written under the pseudonym of “Doğanın Yoldaşı”.

In the depths of the internet, there are many hidden treasures to be found. One of them is this Polish medieval mashup by Nvilia, an example of what I call “parent fiction” – fan fiction written by adults for children. With the help of my Polish teacher Sławomir, I managed to craft an English translation. Enjoy! 😉

The following fanfic is simply called “The Last Kingdom Fanfic” and written by jasminecanada. In this story, King Alfred gets very sick and is cured by princess Gisla, who came with her husband Rollo to attend a royal wedding. When Alfred takes his crown off, he already feels better, but he is not completely healed. Gisla finds a prayer to heal him in his Enchiridion (his notebook) in which she draws a Chi Rho sign. Alfred and Gisla talk about friendship between their peoples and Alfred explains how friendship feels for the Anglo-Saxons.

As you can imagine, the transmedial storytelling around Wiedźmin [The Witcher] combines many of my interests. Therefore, I wish to contribute to this phenomenon by means of a new translation (from Polish to English) of the short stories from the collection Ostatnie życzenie (The Last Wish) by Andrzej Sapkowski. Because of Covid, I could not meet my teacher Sławomir, but last week, he double checked this fourth story for me. ^_^ Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions.

For The Art of Autism and Proud2Bme, I wrote this blog about the challenges around eating that persons with ASD might face. An abridged version (in Dutch) was also published in Lister magazine UP.

As a scholar and a musician, I can carry on with my work. Of course, things have changed – conferences became Zoom calls and concerts got replaced by recordings, for example. Still, I feel that I continue to grow in both areas from the safe place of my home. But how does this work for a martial artist? In this writing, I would like to share the various ways in which I currently work on my martial arts journey, and show you one of my “kata study drawings” as an example. It is my hope that by sharing our ideas, we can support and inspire each other to stay happy & healthy in these times of Corona.

Surakian wrote this untitled fanfiction for The Last Kingdom, in which King Alfred gets very sick (when hiding in the Athelney marshes) and Modwenna cures him. She finds out that he has a wyrm in his spinal cord, and her herbal medicine does not seem to work, but when he is as good as dead, she summons the wyrm (that is called Gifer) to go away. Republished with permission of the author.