honestly i’m surprised drivethrough still exists, i’d expect it to be replaced by ordering on your phone before you even arrive and them just coming out with the food to your car.

yeah i honestly don’t mind it so long as AI is just used to make the old “press a number to select an option” systems better, we do that a lot here and it’s actually purely an improvement.

Now you can actually hear what the robot voice is saying, and instead of selecting 14 increasingly specific options you can just say “i want to change my booking” and the system figures it out.

You can totally find premade viking clothing for purchase but it’ll generally be expensive and not necessarily any good quality.

The nice thing though about premodern commoner clothing is that it’s generally simple enough that you can make it at home, especially with a sewing machine.
Here are some patterns that seem good: https://medievalmusgrave.blog/viking-clothing

I highly recommend making a ruana cloak at least, it’s absolutely trivial to make and very flexible.
All you need is a rectangle of fabric (a blanket works perfectly fine and will be very cozy and hilariously cheap), which you make a cut down the middle of the short side into the middle of the fabric, and then you sew some reinforcement at the end of the cut to prevent it tearing due to strain. If you want to be fancy you can cut out a circle in the middle so it sits a bit more nicely against the neck, and play around with the shape of the outer edges of the cloak.

I find the easiest and most normal-looking way to wear it is to just wrap a belt around the waist, like this:

Then if i need more warmth i can scrunch the fabric up more and basically turn it into a puffy jacket.

not #1? wow you classist smh…

But yeah non-nobility premodern european clothing was fucking sweet, they knew how to dress.
I’m personally a massive fan of viking-style commoner clothing, something about all the wool and usage of single-colour layers really appeals to me, and i think it doesn’t look out of place at all nowadays (at least in the colder months).

Nothing is ever colourful in movies set pre-renaissance, everyone looks like a pauper and kings dress in fucking black leather armor…

In reality most people these days would probably be slightly upset by how garish things were back then, everyone LOVED colour! Even the poorest people would probably have access to some shittily dyed red clothing at least, and from there up the social ladder it would just get more riotously colourful until you get to the nobility who dressed like absolute dickheads.
The Witcher 3 is actually a pretty good way to get a basic idea of what the past was like: not accurate to any one period or region (and mostly draws from renaissance-y europe), but if you ignore the fantasy bits it’s generally closer to sensible than not, and certainly vastly better than most modern portrayals…

Here’s some at least reasonably representative images in order of increasing social status, not necessarily from the same places but all from roughly “medieval” times:

Bonus:

This is one of the things that makes me fucking adore the Temeraire series: the protagonist has a father who is staunchly abolitionist and yet the protagonist himself doesn’t really think about it at all, until quite a bit later in the series when he starts realizing that slavery isn’t just some theoretical thing in “the colonies”.

Meanwhile the dragon protagonist goes “um, isn’t that absolutely horrifying? am i missing something here??” when he learns about the existence of slavery, and this is absolutely pivotal to a lot of the plot in the later books!

are you sure that means the same thing? i’m pretty sure in britain “private school” actually means a school run by the state, which americans would much more sensibly call a public school.

in swedish it’s “indian” for native north american, and “indier” for someone from india.
I feel like one could come up with a similar distinction in english but the best i can come up with is “indie” which is unfortunately already taken and slightly sounds like a slur when used for an ethnic group.

ironically though, speedy is absolutely fucking beloved in latin america