In 2020, archaeologists found a wreck in Swash Channel, near Poole Bay in Dorset, England, believed to be Britain’s oldest known wreck with wooden remains in English waters.
The clinker construction of the hull. The wood used here is Irish oak from the 13th century.(x)
The clinker-built remains have been dated to between 1242-1265 thanks to dendrochronology.
The survival of 13th-century vessels is extremely rare, and prior to this discovery, there are no known wrecks of seagoing ships from the 11th to the 14th century in English waters. There are older wrecks dating back to the Bronze Age in English waters but these only comprise the remains of the cargo and no hull structure remains. Here, too, cargo has been preserved.
Parts of the cargo (x)
The presumably 20m long cargo ship, which probably fell victim to a storm, carried mortars, stone kettles, Gothic Purbeck stone gravestones and raw marble from the nearby Isle of Purbeck, as well as a large kettle for cooking soup, a smaller kettle with a long handle and cups covered in concretions, hence the name Mortar Wreck. The finds are now being cleaned and prepared for display at Poole Museum.
One of the Purbeck Stone gravestones (x)
The wreck itself has now been given protected heritage status, but whether it will ever be lifted is unclear.
“We are here, and this is now.” Constable Visit, a strict believer in the Omnian religion, occasionally quoted that from their holy book. Vimes understood it to mean, in less exalted copper speak, that you have to do the job that is in front of you.
There is a lot to be said for staying where you are.
Infrastructure, local contacts and relationships, property, familiarity, employment, and so on.
That being said, I have moved several times, and been glad I did.
The feeling of welcome or unwelcome in a town/region is something like the pH in a fish tank.
You know when the balance is off.
People don't like change though, so most tend to stay in unfriendly areas, or bad romantic relationships, etc. far past the point that the serious warning signs begin to appear.
Why do people stay too long and die or get ground down?
Partly it's an association of ideas, land=safety and food, and sometimes it's more legitimately spiritual than that. Sometimes it's habit, or pride, or lack of imagination about who else they could be if they were not here, which can be the same thing.
I do know who I could be if I wasn't here, both because I've tried it recently, and other reasons.
I fit in everywhere to a point, and nowhere exclusively.
So how do you know when to stay and when to leave?
Think about a house on a beach.
It starts as a good idea, a good investment.
Sunsets, good memories, structurally sound, healthy sea air for the kids, etc.
This is thriving.
Over time it needs repairs, and this is fine, this is normal. The kids grow up seeing this cycle of seasonal storms and repairs.
This is living well.
The older generation moves out, or stays while one of the kids moves back home to care for them, and the storms are still coming every five years or so. Then every three, then every other year. There's more upkeep, and it's taking either the produce of the adult kid's working life to maintain the house and their parents, or the parents savings, or a combination of both.
This is 'getting by-'.
Some financial tipping point is reached, and the house on the beach becomes the only real extra project the family can afford. The budget for other fun things, financial safety margins, etc go first, then the existing manageable debt starts being juggled in more serious ways.
This is hanging on.
From here it gets worse, and whether the people in the house stay until the sea literally takes the beach sand out from under it, or whether a financial institution gets it by default, no amount of hard work or financial gymnastics is ever going to make staying at this point a good long term decision.
This works for social, and political situations too.
Stay because you love a place, make a difference there, engage with the other people, build communities… but pay attention to whether all the work is being done on your side, or if people are meeting you halfway.
Are they meeting you even partway?
Do they happily talk to everyone in the grocery line except you, and then clam up and avoid eye contact as they say the canned mercantile greetings?
Are there jobs in the area offering a sustainable wage to specifically you?
Is there a dangerous water quality problem, or a history of frequent electrical blackouts in this area?
How many churches are in the town, and do people from different churches have much social contact? Do they have any non religious friends? How do different races interact? For a start, is there more than one culture and/or skin color living there at all…?
I don't mean practice hyper-vigilance here, but It's important to keep the ability to see the warning signs if they do occur, even after living in an area for a long time.
Around 1600, a number of my relatives immigrated to what is now northern Germany because the king of Sweden at the time expelled the Catholics.
In the late 19th century, another branch of relatives immigrated to the US from southwest England when the living-wage jobs in the mining industry there began to dry up.
There are so many other stories.
Every family branch, every time, there are people who came in from Outside, sometimes intending to return, some eagerly, some cursing the necessity, but so far as I know none of them ever moved back.
So when do you pick up, and Go?
Stay as long as you want to, or as long as you can live, not just exist for years while waiting for conditions to get better 'someday'.
Whichever of these conditions gives out first, That's when you should go.
I am slowly losing my mind over the shift towards video as the default media format.
I do not find this to be an efficient way to absorb information. I am bored and distracted by the time the largely unnecessary introduction is over. I can't use ctrl+f to find the specific information I'm looking for. If there are instructions to follow, I don't want to have to constantly pause and back up to the part I need.
I think it considers festivals in general to be a massive logistical security hassle, especially if they happen on a planet. If not on a planet, midwinter/solstice celebrations are nonsense, which also annoys it. I DO think it likes the idea of everyone staying with their families. Indoors. Watching media.
Murderbot is ride-or-die bonded with a ship named for the point in an orbit when the orbiting object is nearest it's local sun. (Earth's next Perihelion, for example, is on Jan 4th, 2024.)
Having lived for more than five minutes on the Corporate Rim, Murderbot will 100% be annoyed by most commercially produced Seasonal songs, but I think the actual reconnection-with-your-crew and mental-step-back-and-reset meanings of whatever version of the winter seasonal holiday is still around might be... acceptable.
"Die Hard? Is that a spoiler, or a threat?"
"The tags say Action and Holiday, but if that sounds too much like work, let's try The Guardians next."
So, like, the thing you have to understand is that prior to the mid-2000s, the "Young Adult" genre as we now know it didn't exist. The expectation was that you would graduate to the adult aisle of the book store at, like, 13-14. This worked because the only people still reading long form novels into their teens were precocious bookworms who were better read than their parents.
Harry Potter changed all this. The success of the Harry Potter books convinced the publishing industry that selling full length novels to normie children was a business model. The thing about the Harry Potter books, though, is that at least for the early books, the target audience was a bit younger than what we think of as the YA demographic; tweens, rather than teens. Now, the publishing very much wanted to keep all these normie kids buying books into their teens and beyond, but the previous model of treating teens as functionally adults for marketing purposes would not work; there was simply no way that normie parents were going to let their normie kids read fully adult novels where the characters, like, do drugs or have unprotected sex and stuff. So, in order to be allowed to market to the teen demographic, the YA genre was created.
However, teens have an inherent interest in reading about sex and violence and drugs, and so authors who are able to incorporate these kinds of themes into their YA novels in a discrete way such that it flies under the radar of the moral guardians are met with success. But this is a precarious tightrope to walk. Not enough "mature" themes and the teens will loose interest, to much or to blatant and the teens won't be allowed to read it. And so, it should come as no surprise, that the first person to successfully navigate this tight rope was a Mormon housewife with a vampire fetish.
…The editor who bought So You Want To Be A Wizard from me in 1981 would’ve been interested to hear somebody claim that YA (and particularly YA fantasy) didn’t then exist… because that’s sure as hell what she—and the book’s first publisher, Dell / Delacorte—called it. (When they weren’t also calling this subgenre “juvenile fantasy”, as in this Locus ad from its publication year)
And that single publisher was buying and publishing multiple such books every year… presumably to keep up with its competition.
…So either the “precocious bookworms” market was particularly strong that decade, or else this kind of genre publishing and marketing was, well, normal… and in fact paved the way for the later success of broadly similar genre works. [waves vaguely in the direction of other YA fantasy that would follow a decade and a half later] And yeah, this is a significant oversimplification of the subject, but it’s nearly 2 AM for me and I’m not up for a full essay on it right now. Maybe later.
However, as for the thesis “the YA genre was created post-the 2000s”? …Nah.
(Meanwhile I can’t just leave with nothing but that sad B&W line art sitting there. Here’s the full cover of that hardcover first edition, by Caldecott-winning artist David Wiesner.)
I have a vague memory of this book. The segmented wand in the boy's hand is a car's radio antenna, and I think it was a present from the car. It's definitely a wand now, though. As I recall he's a technomancer, and machines like him.
The plot, and any other characters?
I have no idea, I just liked the idea of found wands, and being able to be friends with machines.
Deep in a forest in the Burgundy region, a group of enthusiasts is building a castle the medieval way — no motorized machines included.
Guédelon Castle update: still building, new younger people joined, and some of their stonemasons got emergency-headhunted for the Notre Dame Cathedral reconstruction.
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