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, cyborgs, 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).
I had to brush off my Spanish, but with a little help from my friends, I managed to understand this fanfiction about El rey Alfred by Venezuelan Tumblr user marithesoprano. With her permission, here I post her original with an English translation (as literal as possible). Many thanks to Inti & Rosasharn. 🙂
For “UP”, the publication of the Dutch organization Lister, I wrote this piece on autism and identity, in which I discuss forming an identity and expectations, prejudices about autism, and having an “autistic identity”. The Dutch (slightly shorter) version can be read here. All comments are very welcome.
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 …
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 SÅ‚awomir! 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.