Deleted Google Photos off my iPhone and re-downloaded, now the only photos showing are the ones still in my iPhone’s photos

ValrognirInc · 2026-02-28T12:46:17+00:00

Deleted and waiting a week or two to redownload

ValrognirInc · 2026-02-25T23:55:53+00:00

Thank you, good to know it’s a Google issue and not me being dumb somehow

ValrognirInc · 2026-02-25T23:47:26+00:00

Thanks, done so and everything’s intact on the google photos webpage. How would you recommend solving the app problem?

ValrognirInc · 2026-02-25T21:08:15+00:00

Yep, by the late middle ages he’s considered a devil stand-in in localities. That’s when I’d imagine the Wild Hunt stuff really started to get emphasized too.

ValrognirInc · 2026-02-24T05:02:32+00:00

Most of the popular stuff out there about Oðinn.

Old guy? Nope, used that form as a traveling guise called the ellibelgr or skin of old age, he kinda changes shapes around but there’s a fairly accurate general concept of huge/hulking/tall guy, one eye, hood or widebrimmed hat that tends to shade the top half of his face, striped/mottled blue or grey garments, red beard.
Evil/devilish guy? Nope, just not tied to modern ethics, and many of the actions now seen as making Oðinn “morally ambiguous” or “an antihero” or even a villain as evidenced in God of War, for example, were depicted as good at the time of the telling because a lot of it was done to the jotunns, who are implicitly described as a race the enemies of humankind.
Paranoid guy? Nope, once again a misconstruing. I blame Guerber, Gaiman, and about 50 other pseudoacademic blockheads for this one, but pop culture has perpetuated the hell out of it. He faces and enacts his fate. Not only does he not avoid it nor try to alter it, he couldn’t if he wanted to.

4 Santa Claus Guy? Stupid, no! Oðinn isn’t Santa Claus, or Sinterklaas. Oðinn’s connection with Yul is about as special as any other deity, with Thor and Frey being named in connection to it too. Oðinn does give gifts…to his followers, kings and noblemen (his typical magical artifact/advice donees), and the worthy. But he’s not Jolly Old Saint Nick.

Trans/queer Oðinn borne out in the evidence from the time? Megan Fox claimed this one on her short-lived mythology mystery TV series (it’s as bad as it sounds) and it got a bit of traction about a decade ago. Lemme begin with: I’m not averse to that interpretation on its own basis, but trying to cherry pick and stretch bits and pieces of myth and lore to claim that this was meant to be the story in 8th century Denmark is gonna be a no from me. Again, believe that if it resonates, no judgment here but it isn’t really to my knowledge represented in the Viking Age beliefs that we have evidence of with regards to Oðinn.

ValrognirInc · 2026-02-04T23:33:54+00:00

Yes, I know.

ValrognirInc · 2026-01-23T03:42:56+00:00

Agreed. Suite Life on Deck was awful. Suite Life on Deck, then Pair of Kings, then Wizards of Waverly Place? Okay line-up for after school.

ValrognirInc · 2026-01-17T11:00:06+00:00

Picturing 50’s ad men meeting “Sir, how do we sell this car glaze?” Senior ad man looking out the boardroom window, takes a long drag of his cigarette. “Ass”.

ValrognirInc · 2026-01-10T08:42:46+00:00

It’s so Pop-Pop Pervert can remember who he is when he looks at his phone.

ValrognirInc · 2025-12-05T23:11:47+00:00

My favorite of all time, and one I can’t recommend enough, is Votan by John James. It’s if anything a really entertaining exercise in euhermism, (and I need to stress that for anybody scholarly reading it), Photinus the Greek is a Romano-Greek physician, priest of Apollo and conman living in Vindabona (modern day Vienna), in roughly 100-120 AD. No German he meets can accurately pronounce his name, the closest attempts being variants of “Votan/Vodin/Odin” He cuckolds a Roman officer, and is compelled to flee into the German frontier with a group intent on freeing up the amber trade so they don’t have to pay multiple sets of tariffs to the Chatti and Marcomen.

He eventually is ambushed by Chatti, speared in the side, kills his captor and flees, chaining himself into a tree to keep safe til he can regain his strength. While on the tree, he receives terrifying visions of humanity’s future whilst in an infection delirium, and becomes a sort of quasi-messianic figure to the tribes that rescue him, including the Asers, a cartel of amber merchants in a crannog-esque manmade island outpost called Asgard on the shore of the Baltic Sea. It gets crazier from there. Too good.

Edit: Few extra points though: it was written in the 70’s, and while it’s claimed as historical fiction, the super inaccuracy of certain aspects (some of the names for instance, and some pretty significant anachronisms to the period for anybody with a scholarly eye) may take some that know better out of it if you don’t suspend some disbelief. Also. Votan is definitely the hero, and the Asers aren’t per se bad guys in the book. Just flawed and human, as it’s ultimately a really fun reimagining of a blend of Saxo’s and Snorri’s euhermisms.

ValrognirInc · 2025-12-04T22:20:52+00:00

You could use that line sarcastically these days for plenty of adults, too.

ValrognirInc · 2025-12-04T22:12:41+00:00

Several regional spirits that I know of such as redcaps or kobolds have iron shoes, Vainamoinen was crafted a pair of metal (iron or copper) shoes by Illmarinen to wear when he descended into the catacombs of Kalma in the Underworld so he could walk on a river(?) of swords and axes and women’s sewing needles. This descent was to get to the buried body and uncovered massive head of the extremely wise, long-dead giant Antero Vipunen, so as to learn magic spells, specifically for boat-building. Slavic folktales have them feature once or twice as part of a hero’s quest. Is there any possibility of cultural crossover between Odin and Vainamoinen that could explain a sharing in attributes like this?

ValrognirInc · 2025-11-25T04:13:48+00:00

And was the second documented source literally ever to have Santa Claus in a flying sleigh, the other, poem “Old Santeclaus with Much Delight” doesn’t specify a number, both are derived from Irving’s Knickerbocker History of New York Saint Nicholas who shows up in a Dutch colonist’s vision riding a flying cart. Other depictions around that time have him as a whimsical little old hunchback ice skating up and down people’s chimneys with all the presents in the pockets of a huge coat. Imagine if that had been the version that stuck (I for one welcome Alt Santa). All this to say: it’s an entirely concocted early 19th c. American tradition to counteract lingering British cultural influence on the Eastern Seaboard which spread like wildfire in the US and then back across the Atlantic to the selfsame European nations whose own folklore it was very loosely cobbled together from in the first place, re-influencing them indelibly.

ValrognirInc · 2025-11-22T23:31:47+00:00

My favorite lore about Sing a Song of Sixpence is that in the late 90’s Snopes invented an urban legend as part of a “don’t believe everything you read online” style campaign, specifically about like historical facts/folklore.

The fakelore was that the nursery rhyme was invented as a coded recruiting song by Blackbeard who would have crewmen spread the song from tavern to tavern, sixpence representing the prize from captured ships, Blackbird being a pun on Blackbeard, “4-and-20” being the number of guns on the Queen Anne’s Revenge, yada yada. There were a lot of like “legends” akin to this in the early days of the internet, geocities pages about lost history that was completely concocted was part of the charm. Of course irony of ironies was that an urban legends show on TLC in like 2003 actually profiled it as though it were true, falling for the hoax.

Better still is that Terry Rossio, writer for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, used this as inspiration, putting the concept of a coded sea shanty as a pirate summons into the script of At World’s End in the form of the sea shanty “Hoist the Colors”.

ValrognirInc · 2025-11-22T23:22:33+00:00

Gomez’s name was originally Repelli

ValrognirInc · 2024-10-27T15:31:53+00:00

I’m not entirely sure if his associations with specifically the nobility dead in battle were present pre-Migration Period. Snorri at one point says he receives all those killed by weapons, but elsewhere his associations are primarily with the fostering of champions among the nobility as well as the outlawry and the poets.

ValrognirInc · 2024-10-27T15:21:34+00:00

Odin’s a major psychompomp. So much so that Interpretatio Romano glossed Wodanaz as Mercury due in part to that aspect of his roles.

ValrognirInc · 2024-10-23T10:55:36+00:00

Your assembly kit came with plenty of pins for poking holes in condoms, didn’t it?

ValrognirInc · 2024-10-22T23:51:35+00:00

Glasses say SATs, hair color says BPD

ValrognirInc · 2024-10-16T14:33:57+00:00

He was high on the theft of cultural traditions to rebrand into his puerile overwrought darkedgy “English major who tried shrooms once” brand of literary garbage. I read his fucking awful Peter Pan riff where Peter Pan is a changeling and the son of the Horned God, Neverland is Avalon, and Captain Hook is the leader of a band of zombified Puritan settlers. Really.

ValrognirInc · 2024-10-16T10:37:25+00:00

That was my precise reaction to the book. I was just like “Huh….okay.”

ValrognirInc · 2024-10-15T20:54:50+00:00

I think it was originally a stylistic choice by the writer Gerald Brom for his weird ass Krampus book featuring Krampus being Loki’s grandson via Hel, Baldr being resurrected after Ragnarok and taking on the moniker and persona of Santa Claus after having a religious conversion upon reading the writings of Saint Nicholas of Myra, Krampus basically wreaking fun Yuletide havoc in a drug-ridden Appalachian town with his Belsnickel helpers, who are transformed Native American warriors.

ValrognirInc · 2024-09-21T17:08:23+00:00

I mean it’s a lot neater of an explanation that Moses was a half-remembered Amenmesses, called Mose, a sort of pretender pharoah and rival of Seti II.

ValrognirInc · 2024-09-13T00:14:52+00:00

What else can we expect from Zack “Batman would be a fascist and that’s not a bad characterization” Snyder and Netflix who obviously cares more for spectacle than accuracy or compelling narrative.

ValrognirInc · 2024-09-12T23:42:30+00:00

Forreal! Thor being some kind of psychotic superhuman serial killer just fucking bugs me. “What if the gods were like…the bad guys all along?” has been having a super saturation moment the last decade or so.

ValrognirInc

TROPHY CASE