Edit: I’m taking the middle road here and assuming something around year 1250 or so, not 1100 or 1400 as confusingly set in OP.

Okay, so unlike most other scenarios, I think I would be fine for a while at least. The peoples living where I live would have made and kept more or less regular contact with the sons of bitches from the south that would later crusade us (or I think maybe one of the crusades is presently ongoing at the time…) so while I would both introduce and be hit with diseases or more likely strains of familiar ones new to my body/their bodies, I think it wouldn’t be as destructive as entirely separated landmasses like America vs Europe.

So if I survive the shock my body gets hit with, and I don’t kill everyone around me, I think I would be fairly well received. As far as I’ve read, the languages and dialects were different than after the formalization of the written form, and at this time these lands were just starting to get forced under Swedish rule, so with my basic understanding of Swedish and of course my native language, I think I would be able to communicate well enough to not get instantly killed as a demon or something.

I think my best bet would be to introduce myself as some sort of demi-god, a bastard son of the god of forests and the hunt probably, which would hopefully explain my alien attire and materials used to make them. And the alien accent/dialect of both the local language or Swedish, depending on where I’d land. If the first contact I make aren’t local but crusaders, I suppose I’d have to try and push myself as a wandering preacher of Christ or something. I’d have to hope they’d speak Swedish, since I do not know German well enough to form two words together, and they’d likely be the next likely encounters. Novgorodians I think were fine with the Swedish language in general, so if our current knowledge of history was off enough that I’d meet them here, I’d still be fine. No idea what I’d pretend to be to them though. My limited knowledge of history doesn’t help there. But as far as I understand, they were sort of a melting pot of close-by cultures, and not so focused on these lands at this time, they’d just take me for a local hermit and let me run off clumsily.

If I was able to survive the first encounters and get myself to a village or a hillfort, I’d try and establish myself as a wise one, helping with calculations and engineering and whatnot to the best of my capabilities, which I would think honestly should far exceed those of the locals at the time. So maybe I’d get by just for being useful and knowledgeable.

But I don’t think I’d live a long life. These were a turbulent and violent time and one village elder or the other, fancying themself a king or whatever, would just send assassins to off me for being an asset for the local leader where I’d end up in.

Even if I’d travel to avoid this problem, it probably wouldn’t take until my old ages to have someone or something off me just by happenstance. And I wouldn’t want to live a hermit in a time where internet or computers aren’t a thing. I think the only way to cope would be to focus on a family, try and bring up children and have that fulfill my life as best it can, as long as it can.

Honestly, I consider myself lucky in this scenario. We still have our language alive and in use, the same the locals would speak at that time. This together with the general superstitious nature of the local tribes — which the crusades and Christianity, with overt blood and sadistic violence, would (thankfully later, I hope for my sake here, at least according to our current knowledge) succeed in some amount to water down and turn them to its specific flavor of lame ass superstition — would make it probably at least somewhat likely I wouldn’t be killed on sight or something to that effect.

Before even reading the article, I’m thinking they’re maybe selling it as a good thing along the lines of “do you hate to see those ads you don’t care about? Taking space on your apps and pages? What if there was a way to make them actually useful! Make them feel like content, just for you!”

I feel like I have to point out that this is horrific either way

Edit: I actually talked about this quickly with a few almost tech-illiterate friends and they were honestly excited about that at first, when I didn’t preface it with my reasoned disdain for it or the privacy implications… so despite the way we here react to it, I’m almost sure this will sell amazingly.

If you mean self-hosting email, then good luck.

It’s a lottery with the IP and even the IP space you get, whether anyone will actually receive your emails.

I hosted my own for a few years, but god fed up telling everyone to dig through their junk folder for my emails, and not being responded to very often, probably because of just that.

Maybe some providers have it better, but I tried a few and each was just not good. I really think Microsoft, Amazon, Google and other big players have intentionally separated the good, trusted IPs, ones they use for email services specifically, and made the other worse

Personally, I think it’s because life is beautiful, the world is beautiful, people are for the most part beautiful. In a hell, I don’t think we should have so much beauty and majority of our time spent in awe of this all, enjoying our time, the nature and each other.

I think this might very well be a hell, though, if one focuses on the bad stuff. Which is way too easy these days with our phones and constant cycle of news and updates and whatnot.

But to be a hell, overall, I would think there wouldn’t be so much niceness, so much endearing stuff, so much love and joy. I know not everyone gets nearly enough of those, but there are people, like me, who are just way too lucky I guess, or maybe it’s a little bit about attitude or perspective gained by having been at the lowest lows, but also able to escape those pits of suicidal despair. And, again, in a hell, I can’t imagine they’d let you escape and lead a joyous, happy life, in a beautiful, breathtaking world

Edit: Also, like one commenter put it so well: What does it matter?

If this is all a hell, then I’m okay with that. It’s nice. It doesn’t matter what this “actually” is. It’s just nice, warts and all.

It took me over ten years to realize this too, although I was young and stupid so it kind of follows. I started carrying a bag with a seal with me and if there wasn’t a public ash tray in view, I’d just drop them in there and I was so ashamed when I first started that, since it was so easy and all the things I thought would be problems, like the smell, just… literally never was. And how quickly the bag would fill up, ugh. All that used to go to the ground. Note however that I was conscious of littering and always if I knew there was an ash tray, say, no more than some 100m detour from my current path, I’d just take the extra steps to put it there. But they are surprisingly rare, especially towards the end of my smoking habit, when smoking started to really die out and be a lot less common. A lot of places, like bars for example, didn’t necessarily put ash trays by the door or terrace, which was how it used to be.

I’m lucky I got out of the habit. But I can sort of emphatise those who do it without thinking about it, especially if they are young.

Younger generations are also lucky, at least here, since smoking is so ludicrously expensive nowadays with the taxes and all, and add to that good education, I very rarely see young people smoking anymore. Seems to be mostly people in their 30s or 40s — my age group — and of us, mostly the “hillbilly” types.

I do use nicotine pouches though, to this day. Low nicotine ones, but anyway. Those are very natural for not trashing, like the Nordic snus, since the pucks/containers come with its own small compartment for the used pouches, that’s easy to clean up at home. And those pucks are very recyclable too (granted that the region has the sort of plastic sorting that differentiates washable/directly reusable containers like we do for glass) which at least from what I have seen, gets done properly a lot of the time.

In general, I think the newer generations are much more aware of all this and do a great job of being conscious of the environment, not only at the global scale, but also just the local environment and surroundings too.

Let’s just hope we didn’t fuck up bad enough so that they might have a chance at adulthood and actually transferring all that to more effective and serious politics and activism. We might just get saved ourselves, too, if they just learn to be decisive enough to push us fuckups out of the picture. God I hope enough of them have the dreams, passion and idealism to actually have that drive and fire.

This became a random tangent, sorry if you got this far!

Initially I, too, claimed those, but ultimately I never ended up playing them and often I’d just end up buying them from steam instead. It’s funny how I’m willing to pay for something I can have for free, if it’s convenient and easy. So I didn’t claim them for very long, stopped a long time ago, and still just ignore it if a game I thirst for is available for free.

But that’s also a pretty dark prospect: Because I have my entire extensive library on steam, I’m kind of stuck with them. And while they are not abusing that presently, I’m fairly confident they will someday. And I, along with most everyone playing on pc, will be shit out of luck then.

It’s hard to diversify at this point, when I’m too far gone, and knowing changing or adding services will increase the complexity of using it all and keeping mental track of all the games and where they are.

Ugh.