Happy Baldr's Rebirth Day/Jesus's Birthday/Mithras's Birthday/Newton's Birthday/Elevation of Constans/etc.

But only if you deserve it.

Quote:I'm in therapy at the moment. I don't need it, obviously, but I got all these psychiatrist gift vouchers for Christmas which my family clubbed together for. What I really wanted was a crossbow.

-- Sean Lock

There are two exchange rates - the actual exchange rate, and the consumer exchange rate. The former is mid market price, and the latter is fictional, but used by everyone to screw you over. "No fee currency exchange" really means "We're still screwing you over, but hiding it in the exchange rate".

Since I quoted a Danish Heathen in the English thread, it's only right that I quote a Christian in the Danish thread:

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

Grant shall ye gifts of friendship,
Since grows of Són the Seedling
In our tongue's fertile sedge-bank:
True praise of our High Lord.

On a similar note:

Quote: Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheap dailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

-- Sir Peter Brian Medawar

Quote:One is never alone with a rubber duck.

-- Golgafrinchan Ark B captain

Make that five times in eleven days. I want ten in the next eleven now.

I've won four times in the last 11 days. If I don't win eight times in the next 11 days, I'll....think of a suitable punishment later.

Has anybody ever reacted positively to an autoresponder? I know I would definitely stop using the program you were spamming me about, and not only would you lose me as a referral, but you'd also get to meet my axe.

$60 a month on average this year. More than last year, primarily by stopping doing tasks, and starting doing persona.ly instead - thanks to Hansgruber for that tip (I had opened some offerwalls, but not that one until he mentioned it).

Again, a merger of traditions. This is the rebirth of Baldur, and the birth of Mithras, it's not coincidence Jesus latched on.

I'm not convinced forgetting a birthday reduces the validity of your worship though. It's a pretty recent trend that people know their date of birth. If you look back even just seventy or eighty years, an awful lot of records are filled in inconsistently from folk who don't know when they were born. Back two thousand years or so when there were no records at all? I'm not convinced Jesus cares. At all.

I find Christmas so very interesting - see my thread called Jul, for example.

Mercia was pagan, the Bretons were pagan, Wessex was Christian and the Danes were pagan. In 878, Guthrum defected to Wessex, and was baptised a Christian (with a whole bunch of other high ranking Danes) - but he was actually pagan. The baptism was political, so rather than replacing Jul with the Christmas they merged over the following years. The festivals were already similar due to just plain old people mixing with one another over the years, but this event was important to us, because this is where our version of the modern festival was formed. Or rather, the modern version of both festivals.

Every year, I manage to learn something more. This year, it was the Norway has the same festival of Jul, but has a different time span for it. It was only six or seven years ago I discovered most of the rest of the UK (even most of the rest of Yorkshire!) has no concept of Jul at all. You just assume what you do is the same as what everyone else does.

So yeah, it drags on a bit and like that advert on telly, yes, it's a bit boring, and a celebrity death really helps - but it's still fundamentally interesting - a living piece of history.

A woman isn't a real woman unless she could quite happily kill you quietly in your sleep.

Miss World will never be a true judgement on a woman's beauty until they have a round where the women meet one on one, axe to axe.

Quote:If stretch limos are so great why is it every time i drive past one someone is trying to climb out of the window?

-- Sean Lock

I was just talking about this with a Norwegian friend, and it seems even the start date - December 20th - is somewhat arbitrary. Why it became December 20, I do not know, but the dates are somewhat more fluid in Norway, still related to the Germanic calendar.

billykilroy wrote: When and how will I get paid (Cashout)?
This is what I saw the first time sarge25 posted. I have seen many times people change the links to cover up what they made a mistake on.

Nice try, but edits leave a stamp which cannot be hidden.

Edit - like, see this post, which now has an edit stamp, because I'd previously called it a time stamp, then edited it.

...we're near the end of a line, but there's a border to somewhere waiting, and there's a tankful of time.

Today (it's just turned Sunday in Denmark where this all started) is the first day of Jul.

Freyr shall ride over the Earth on the back of his shining boar, bringing light and love back the world. Baldur will also be reborn during this festival.

The darkest night, the brightest hope. The Wild Hunt in it's greatest splendor, the dead rome the earth imparting their wisdom and advice upon their ancestors.

Odin charges across the sky mounted on Sleipnir, and children leave him hay and sugar in their boots, and he shall, in return, leave them a gift.

In latter nights, Freyr became the Star of Bethlehem, Baldur became Jesus, the Wild Hunt moved to the end of October, Odin on his horse became this other bearded guy with reindeer, and boots became stockings.

But nevertheless, it's the one time of year all major religions merge into one. The true meaning of Jul, of Yuletide, of Christmas is deep down, despite our widely differing deeply held personal beliefs, once history has forgotten enough to remove the silly little details we all bicker about, actually, deep down, on the fundamental parts, we all agree.

WINE 1.8 is out. I normally only complain about other updates in this thread, but WINE 1.8 is really worth posting about.

WINE 1.8 implements CSMT (command stream multi-threading) which is, well, you don't need to understand it - it's a change to the graphic logic, and the upshoot for end users is the greatest performance gain I've ever seen between any two versions of any piece of software. I've been running the dev branch for months, and I'm playing Windows games on Linux that my computer isn't good enough to play natively on Windows.

If you've got a Mac,or you're on Linux, you can now run more Windows software than Windows can, and you can run it better.

Release Notes and download link. It will become available in most package managers over the next few days.