#ooc

Its a confusing shot of the corner of two miss-matching shelves.

Lotta books

I live near the biggest bookstore in the nation. -hangs head- and I am weak.

hahahahaha

ooo, Kiss Me Kate

We're in the process of culling/rearranging pretty much all our books...which means they're in stacks all over the house. It's a bit overwhelming.

*waves!*

Shady, who do I want to play?

What genre does everyone prefer? Obviously, mine aren't nearly as bad as the titles suggest -- True Crime, history, pathology and tracking disease, in the titles mentioned.

pokes da Shades They want me to make you come to Pennsic, girlie.

High Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Horror...and even some non fiction stuff, but a lot of that leans towards psychology and neurology.

Ooh...wants to get hands on the last two

Watched a fascinating documentary on the Dare Stone last night.

I have given up pretending to be interested in anything pop culture these days. I like documentaries.

Whazzat?

I like documentaries and food shows. Heh.

The Lost Colony of Roanoke?

I read lots of things. I enjoy hubris and natural disasters for my non-fiction, though

Wasn't that when a bunch of people up and vanished?

I know about the lost colony...haven't heard about the dare stone.

yup

though by "vanished" you mean "ran off to live with the natives"....

Actually..

Roanoke? Rowan-Oak?

Yeah, we know where they got "lost." Abducted by Almond, more like.

I needs must sleep, my friends. Lots of energy going into the job, just now.

Rest up!

Have Magic Kingdom-y dreams. 😉

night shades

Seeya, Shades! waves! The Dare Stone was thought to be a hoax for a long time because it was lumped in with some hoax stones in the 30's. Eleanor Dare was the pregnant daughter of the captain. They were low on supplies, and so the captain went back to England to re-stock....when he came back, everyone, and the entire settlement, had vanished.

No one knew why, how, or where. So a lot of investigating went into this....the kind of stuff I lov. wry A stone had been discovered early in the 20th century, saying in Elizabethan English, what had happened to them. They had moved inland, and came under attack by natives. Out of 117, native attacks and disease killed all but 7, including her baby son.

So what happened to the other 7?

That's the interesting part.

20 years later, John Smith of Jamestown...everyone knows him....was sent partly by the Virginia Company to look for them.

The idea was, any colonists remaining...and they didn't know how many....would know the native relations and where to find copper, which was abundant there, and other metals. Of course, they were attacked too...but he was spared, and found out from the Powhatans that there were survivors....and separately, another Englishmand learned the same thing, and a corroborating number was recorded....7.

They had been taken and were used as slave labor in native copper mining, and in short, everywhere John Smith went, he was stymied, as the people who had them would not give them up. They came close, but couldn't. Now, the investors of the Virginia Company were facing a backlash in England over treatment of the natives, a historian said, and the voyage's backers would not have liked hearing that they were outnumbered and the mission had failed. So a huge coverup was manufactured, they believe, one of the biggest in histroy....they lied, said all the colonists had been slaughtered by natives....which gave an excuse to genocide the Powhatan natives.

Huh. Interesting but not really surprising!

The Dare stone was discovered to be quartz...and they believe it was carved by Eleanor Dare to her father, and they traced the stone to copper mines in the local area of Roanoak. Almost identical, which adds credence.

No, but tragic, really.

Yeah. I feel sorry for those people.

They had called in stonemasons, and they debunked the other stones using high-res pics, as the others having been created with a drill. The original stone was actually chiseled with iron tools. They called in a linguist, looked at who would have access to all the knowledge needed to perpetuate such a hoax,...and what it took to get access to those academic libraries...and said it couldn't have been done by one person. But ED would have had the knowledge of old english (ye and superscript ye are different meanings, a very obscure fact).

They used USGS data to track the most likely areas of the colony, and cross-referenced it with maps and descriptions by John Smith and others, to find a good match.

Hmmm..I might look more into it. Or at least into the stones. Its really interesting.

Just....a lot of investigating of the sort I like (and yeah, triy to emulate in RP, not nearly as well as these people), and digging up obscure references. And the Dare Stone went from being in a closet in a University as a hoax, to back as a piceless artifact that could have solved the mystery of the Lost Colony. Archaological digs are ongoing; they found English pottery shards mixed in with Native artifacts at dig sites, that mean they could have figured out where exactly.

So...yeah, I prefer this to those supernatural shows and sitcoms that are on TV. 😛

Last documentary I watched was a short one on Romanian Witchcraft.

Cool!

That was interesting! Because its still very much believed in today. And the Women who are witches in Romania make a lot of money. And they are not even taxed for it. The government tried to pass a bill to tax them, but then got scared of being cursed and hexed.

Hah!