Categories
Resources

Voluspa and how Odin messed me up

Voluspa (translated by W.H. Auden and P.B. Taylor), from an Asatru site. Astru sites can be a bit spooky, but here’s one that shows a sense of humor: Loki: A Paean in Progress.

Why do I say that Asatru is spooky? Well, it compounds the general spookiness of religion with the fact that the objects of worship are ones I originally ran across in a Marvel comic.

To understand how The Mighty Thor messed me up, consider that I created my own character as an imitation (like I did with many of my favorite superheroes) and made him the son of the Hebrew god, like Thor was the son of Odin, king of the gods. Now, the Thor comics don’t mention that Odin is king of the Norse gods only, and apparently I wasn’t even acquainted with Zeus (or I was, but somehow reconciled the two, just like the comics did), so I spent time explaining to myself the relationship between Odin and Big J, the god we were learning about at school.

Anyway, for a refresher on Norse mythology, here’s a quick summary page, with multiple diagrams. It’s all in Norwegian (I think), but it’s easy to follow if you know the names. I need to make something like this in Hebrew.

Categories
Resources

Runes, Odin and Wotan worship

Ankou’s Page of Runes is an excellent source of information about Runes, and includes a mapping of the runes to the magic spells described by Odin in the Hávamál.

The site also describes some interesting variant Rune sets, including one by the Austrian racist mystic (and neo-pagan) Guido List, who claimed to have seen the “original” set of runes in a vision while blinded by cataract. The best pages about List seem to be in German, but some info appears in this dissertation about the roots of German national socialism, this distasteful rant about the ties between Homosexuality, Occultism and Nazism, and this article about Nazis and the Occult, which is part of a site that covers overall weirdness but has a special section on occult conspiracies and mystic societies.

Categories
Roleplaying

Secret Origins

On Rock Scissors Blog, Bruce Baugh bitches about the abbysmal list of Origin 2002 awards final nominees. On A related note, he plugs Andy Kitkowski’s Indie RPG Awards.

Categories
Software and Programming

Parsing HTML with Perl

The Perl Journal has a good tutorial to Parsing HTML with HTML::PARSER, by Ken MacFarlane.

Worth noting that this is already sub-classed (and re-used) by lots of other modules in CPAN. Although I think the common approach is either to (a) use RegExps to parse what you need or (b) use some black-box tool to convert the HTML to well-formed XML, and parse that.

The HTML::Tree objects (tree builder and tree node classes) are another interface to the HTML::Parser, as is HTML::TokeParser. I think I’ll stick with hacking on the plain parser for now. Bah. It doesn’t work – some obscure bug when calling the “parse” method, which doesn’t appear in the source – compiled code, perhaps? In any case, I’m using RegExps….

Categories
Comics

S-E-X-Men


SEX SELLS – NEW X-MEN #118
– subliminal sexual messages in NEW X-MEN #118. Heh. Gotta go re-read that issue now. (link via Linkmachinego)

Also from Linkmachinego comes the Zenith phase 3 scorecard, which is ridicilously obscure, but just the sort of link I love (it’s part of a site describing superhero characters in UK comics).