ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝

A geologist and archaeologist by training, a nerd by inclination - books, films, fossils, comics, rocks, games, folklore, and, generally, the rum and uncanny… Let’s have it!

Elsewhere:

  • Yrtree.me - it’s still early days for me in the Fediverse, so bear with me
  • 42 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I just feel like I’m dying inside. I’m literally giving it six months or I’m filing for divorce. That will be her birthday present if we can’t find common ground. I would rather live in a shack, mired in debt and alone, seeing our four kids every now and then, then be this fucking miserable every night.

    Have you told her this? Have you tried couple’s counseling?

    She may think she needs to get her head down and work hard to sort out the finances, then she can work through the emotional stuff but that’s not working for you. Better she finds out now, when you can work on fixing it, rather than when you hand the papers over.











  • Yeah, I was pondering if it’d be possible to make it less of an issue. I presume the metal of the discs and chain is pretty thin, so you could get to work with tin snips, a file and some needle-nose pliers. Take them off, rework some and hang them back up. However, a) I’m not sure it could be done satisfactorily and b) that sounds like a lot of hassle for some, hopefully, cheap knickknack, so I’d probably just make it have an accident.











  • One Summer I got Paul G Bahn’s Journey Through the Ice Age, stuck some post-it notes in on anything that look interesting and drove down through the Dordogne to the Ariege. The wealth of ancient art is astounding, even if you just branch out from the classics, like Lascaux (which you have to do while in the area).

    So the ones that still stand out in my memory are:

    • Abri du Cap Blanc which has stunning animal carvings
    • Niaux - which is quite the experience as you get to feel quite how magical such places would be. You start high up on the valley in what would have been a great position for hunter-gatherers to spot game, then enter the cave, pass the pools and into a long, dark tunnel that opens into a huge cave with numerous animal drawings
    • Bédeilhac which is a vast cave (it housed an aircraft factory in WW2) with a range of stone age art in a number of techniques.

    Then, when you have the key locations locked down, you can search around for others, via pages like Prehistoric Sites of the Vezere Valley and the Prehistoric caves in the Ariège Pyrenees (which mentions Le Mas d’Azil, which is worth a look as the road goes through the cave but you can only see reproductions of the art, and the Prehistoric Park that might give you other pointers). It’s become a lot easier to research thanks to the Web - this seems a good place to start. Looking through that, I think that holiday I get to most of the ones in the Vezere, Lot and Ariege. They are relatively close by and the sites are usually not far from each other, so you can visit a few in one day.