It’s no longer cosplay when the game gets real. Maisie is feeling glum about her cosplay and her prospects with a certain cosplaying MinVid celebrity when she is kidnapped. Thinking it’s a gym-bro gone too far, she realizes the game is very real when he steps through a portal and transports her to another realm. Scottie isn’t about to let a very real orc take off with Maisie. Shifting into his berserker form, he runs after her, only to get trapped inside a video game. They have to work together to stay alive, and hope their friends can rescue them. Only Maisie doesn’t want to return to the real world if it means losing Scottie’s affection. You don’t choose the berserker life. The berserker life chooses you.

In a whirlwind fusion of fantasy and reality, magic portals rupture, thrusting creatures from video game realms into our world. Modern-day followers of Odin and gamer Vikings—Vik, Wolf, and Scottie—are propelled into a realm where cosplay transcends imagination, and Viking avatars are forced to shape-shift for battle. Join the adrenaline-fueled journey as love intertwines with danger in this captivating trilogy: Bear: Aaliyah's acceptance of Vik's invitation leads to a perilous revelation, where danger and desire collide in a heart-pounding quest for truth. Wolf: Yeardley's programming prowess is put to the ultimate test in a battle of epic proportions, igniting a fiery passion amidst the chaos. Boar: As Maisie falls prey to a real orc's clutches, Scottie rushes to her aid only to discover they must navigate perilous challenges in a video game realm, where the lines between reality and fantasy blur, and the prospect of losing each other looms large. In this gripping collection, where "you don't choose the berserker life, the berserker life chooses you," immerse yourself in the thrilling union of magic, adventure, and love. Get ready for a rollercoaster ride of gamer romance, shape-shifting Vikings, and paranormal passion that will leave you breathless. For readers who enjoy Zoe Chant and Meg Ripley

After Jack becomes apprenticed to a Druid bard, he and his little sister Lucy are captured by Viking Berserkers and taken to the home of King Ivar the Boneless and his half-troll queen, leading Jack to undertake a vital quest to Jotunheim, home of the trolls.

In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.

The Viking King Authun leads his men on a raid against an Anglo-Saxon village. Men and women are killed indiscriminately but Authun demands that no child be touched. He is acting on prophecy. A prophecy that tells him that the Saxons have stolen a child from the Gods. If Authun, in turn, takes the child and raises him as an heir, the child will lead his people to glory. But Authun discovers not one child, but twin baby boys. Ensuring that his faithful warriors, witnesses to what has happened, die during the raid Authun takes the children and their mother home, back to the witches who live on the troll wall. And he places his destiny in their hands. And so begins a stunning multi-volume fantasy epic that will take a werewolf from his beginnings as the heir to a brutal Viking king, down through the ages. It is a journey that will see him hunt for his lost love through centuries and lives, and see the endless battle between the wolf, Odin and Loki - the eternal trickster - spill over into countless bloody conflicts from our history, and over into our lives. This is the myth of the werewolf as it has never been told before and marks the beginning of an extraordinary new fantasy series from Gollancz.

The Hávamál is a Norse mythology book containing a collection of ancient Norse wisdom. Thought to have been written down in about 1270 CE. The title, Hávamál, translates as "Sayings of Har." Har is the High One, another name for Odin. So they are the "Sayings of the High One." These sayings are a collection of poetry, offering insights and wisdom to help one lead a good life.