Duke Street Alley

Weather: Dull. No rain to be seen; still feels damp out there.
Breakfast: Muesli, yogurt, blueberries, gooseberries and raspberries from the garden, coffee.
Wearing: Black jeans, Korpiklaani tshirt. Standard issue Tesco socks.
vIMC Sessions attended yesterday: 5. See post just before this.
Things done yesterday: vIMC, cooking. Couple of episodes of The Magicians in the gaps and when the Elder Cat wanted sits, and I also thinned the apples in the hope of getting fewer larger apples this year. And set up the new tumblr account, because despite being 42, I still apparently have the brain and neophilia of someone half my age.
Things to do today: vIMC.

You take your eye off it for one moment...

Inbox: Back at 425

And the newsletters folder, where I usually read everything the day it arrives, is at 33. Well, something to do between sessions tomorrow, I suppose.

Yesterday was the first day of the vIMC. I attended three sessions, of variable actual interest. There were some tech snafus, and everybody's first words were 'can you hear me?', but by and large, things were made to work.

Writing Identity in Liminal Spaces, I: Crafting Religious Identities

The first talk had two excellent speakers, one (Emma Knowles) dealing with the concept of the wilderness (weste/westen) in Old English scriptural texts, specifically dealing with Hagar. She talked about the tension between the wilderness as the place in which one finds the divine, in early texts, and the wilderness as the place of exile from God, in later texts and church approaches, and it was fascinating.

The second speaker was Robert Cutrer, who was looking at Yngvars saga víðförla, and pointing out that it's essentially Icelandic propanganda, resetting Iceland and Sweden as barbarous places on the edge of the world to central, Christian places, by way of recasting the south and east as a land of monsters and hostile magic. Both papers worked together very well.

Borders in Tolkien's Medievalism, I

There's always Tolkien in medieval conferences. It's more medievalism than medieval, but that'll do. Andrzej Wicher talked about categories of fey in Tolkien and Lewis, and their relation to something called The Model, which is apparently some sort of framework for where entities fit in the world. Andoni Cossio spoke about the connections between the myth/legend of Sir Orfeo and Mirkwood in Tolkien. I wasn't so interested in the concepts here, but there were some absolutely great bits of information floating through, with interesting bits and pieces of refererences.

Fantasies of the Medieval

This drifted off into lit crit for the most part, which is fine in its own context, but not what I was looking for. Before that, though, there was mention by Judy Kendall of a novel called The Wake, which is written in an invented pseudo-medieval form of English in order not to have 11th century characters speaking in 21st century words. That's something I'll have to look into.

Watching: I am completely up-to-date on Agents of SHIELD, including the six-episode web-mini-series that sits between seasons 3 and 4. Except for the episode which aired last night in the US, which I'll see later today. The next thing I want to catch up on is The Magicians; I think I got to the end of Season 3, but I couldn't swear to it.

Reading: I finished out The Root, and found it good; the two separate plotlines don't quite connect, which feels strange, but I assume they'll do so in the second book, which I'll acquire soon. I suppose this is a thing now, in the wake of GRRM.

I ran through Jools Sinclair's Girl on the Ghost Train in about an hour, which was mildly entertaining, but mostly just a bit odd, in all of writing style, world-building and characters. I keep thinking that if things like that can get published, I should have no problem, but I'd also need to finish some of my fiction to make that argument.

Currently on Zen Cho's The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (another confirmation of my prediction that long titles like those of Becky Chambers would be in in 2020), and finding it good. There's a very fine lingual detail there of using the words "brother" and "sister" as pronouns, which I'll need to look up and see if it's a real thing.

The morning post is probably here for the next while even if, like this one, it actually lands in early afternoon.

( What's that, Skip? The Prime Minister of Australia is down a well? GOOD JOB! )

I have unlocked the functionality to rename animals in Wurm. Which is to say, I have a branding iron.

We therefore now have first-generation cows Abbatissa, Acorsa, Acfrida, Acleberta, Aclehilde, Adalfrida, Agintrude, Adalinde, and Aizivella, and bulls Abbo, Aclehard, and Adberg. Since they're wild-caught cattle, they don't have identifiable parents.

Then in the second generation we have Bertha, daughter of Aizivella, Benna the Keen, daughter of Abbatissa and Adberg, Blithe the Tough, daughter of Adalfrida and Adberg, Bethangaria, daughter of Acorsa and Abbo, Benneda, daughter of Adalinde and Adberg, Bertagilde, daughter of Acleberta and Adberg, Beauregarda, daughter of Acleberta and Aclehardand, Bathsheba, daughter of Aclehilde and Adberg. Baldwin is the assigned second-generation bull, but he's wild-caught as well.

Among the first-generation sheep, we have Zacharia, Zwybolda, Zwerda, Zinistra, Zephrya, Zinnabar, Zipporah, Zerolia, and Zenuflexa, and rams Zumboldt and Zebedon.

The second-generation sheep are Witta, daughter of Zerolia and Zumboldt, Wipple, daughter of Zerolia and Zebedon, Wilhelmina, daughter of Zenuflexa and Zebedon, Wenta the Fierce, daughter of Zipporah and Zebedon, Winsy, daughter of Zenuflexa, Wisterhild, daughter of Zenuflexa and Zebedon, Wirra the Lightning, daughter of Zephyra and Zumboldt, Winifreda, daughter of Zacharia and Zumboldt, Wintermina, also daughter of Zacharia and Zumboldt, Walla, daughter of Zinistra and Zebedon, and the wild-caught rams Wiggo and Winebalder.

I find this immensely entertaining. I shall keep you updated on these important affairs as more animals arrive.

Experiment. I'll most likely kill it in the morning.

( Unless you count raccoons / and opossums who do not use lawn furniture? )

Experiment. I'll most likely kill it in the morning.

( With their own hands quarried from hard words / A figure in which secret things confide )

Experiment. I'll most likely kill it in the morning.

( How about a pair of pink sidewinders / And a bright orange pair of pants? )

We're currently looking to get hold of chickens - this is korpikuusi's project, really - and I keep thinking I hear chickens already. There's a name for the effect whereby, when everything is quieter, single sounds seem louder, but damned if I can find it right now. However, in the last few weeks, as there was less traffic, and more people home, things like lawnmowers, backyard conversations, barking dogs, and the like have become much more evident. Most of these I can tune out, like I tune out the usually constant house and car alarms around here - although they've been gone for the last couple of months too; people are home to turn them off. But for some reason, bird sounds - pigeons, blackbirds, thrushes, magpies - make it through the filters, as do the apparently, as yet, imaginary chickens.

I am looking for a few terms to go in the Interests section of the DW profile, and I don't know what words to use.

First up, fantasy economics. I find the idea that you can have a fantasy world that is "just like medieval Europe, only with magic" to be nonsense. You can just about have one where the magic is hidden, but if it's overt, then it's going to make differences in the way society and economics work. There are writers who have done glorious things with this; Max Gladstone foremost among them. I feel like there should be a single word for this, or at least a catchier term, but it's escaping me.

Next up, something like goblincore or witch aesthetic, but to describe my own personal aesthetic. 'Scholarpunk' is the closest I've come so far, but it doesn't get the cabin-y rock-and-nature aspect.

And then, something to describe the form of small-scale online social interaction that many people are experiencing in the slow retreat from Facebook. I have the concept of 'dark forest glades', but that's three words, and kind of requires already knowing what the term means before you can get the impression I want from it, rather than the literal meaning of open spaces in dense woodland.

Ideas?

Experiment. I'll most likely kill it in the morning.

( Sparing your pages )

One of the things I loved from back-in-the-LJ-days were the long discursive posts on people's list of favourite films, or books in X genre or the like. I have had some recent thoughts on the deeply obscure approach of Top 10 Things in My HeadCanon. Only because I can't leave things simple, this becomes Extended Headcanon. C'mere, let me ramble at you.

The canon of literature is, more or less, the body of work which is considered to be the ‘core’ of fiction, to which other fiction responds and references and in so doing ideally creates new canon works. So clearly, obviously there should be a list of the canon works, which someone getting into literature should be able to read and... no?

There really isn’t. Canon is an idea, not an actual thing. The genre called literary fiction (for which the rules are that characters must be miserable, there isn’t a positive resolution, and the writing is more important than the narrative) has one fuzzily defined set, which often gets the definite article, and other genres have their own canon, and even within a given genre, two critics, writers, or readers might set out a list of canon works that don’t overlap.

“Headcanon” comes from sf fandom and specifically from fanfic, and means a concept that a particular person accepts as fact in a particular setting (giving rise to the slightly different usage of “canon”) even though it hasn’t been actually stated in that setting. Then there’s the “Expanded Universe” idea in Star Wars and Star Trek; the films and TV series are “definitely true”, but there are lots of novels, comics and other works which don’t quite count in the same way but are generally accepted. And there was the decision at some stage that the Star Wars EU was definitely not going to be followed in the later movies, which led to the “disappearance” of beloved characters like Mara Jade, who now never existed.

Pulling these together, I can get to what I call the “extended headcanon”; everyone can have their personal canon, the set of written (or televisual, or whatever) works that they feel form a core of story, genre, or theme that’s meaningful to them. They’re probably not books in the same universe or even the same genre, but they are the books that form the Canon of You, the books that someone would need to read, the films and TV series they’d need to watch in order to have an understanding of the things you reference and respond to.

These extended headcanons are deeply personalised. Sometimes (and I regard this with a little bit of horror), a person’s own canon is going to contain works they haven’t seen, but reference anyway. The Princess Bride seems to be a major influence in this area, as are the works of one William Shakespeare.

I’ve been trying to work out what would be in mine. This is a long project, because we’re not always aware of the things we reference, and sometimes feel that something is a commonplace phrase when it actually has one specific source, or vice versa, or just plain forget where we got the concept that, say, space whales are a thing. I haven’t forgotten that, mind; that was Dragon Magazine Issue 183, published July 1992.

I’m not going to attempt to lay all of my own extended headcanon out here - that would keep me typing for a long time. But I want to poke through a few bits from very early on.

Mostly, it turns out, this is around concepts of how fantasy and sf worlds work. There was pretty limited access to either in Ireland in the early 1980s, and there was no cinema in reasonable distance, so I feel like a lot of this is rather idiosyncratic. The first fantasy book that I read knowing it was a genre was The Hobbit, followed immediately by Lord of The Rings, although I had a solid grounding in Classical and Norse mythology from Newnes Pictorial Encycopedia (published in 1932 or so), and some Irish mythology from history classes in school. Shortly after that I saw a documentary on the making of The Dark Crystal, and then I saw the thing itself (specifically in that order). Star Trek II was on TV around then too - that must have been one of the short periods where we had a TV in the house. I remember seeing He-Man cartoons on TV in a friend’s house, but only briefly. We definitely had Ulysses 31 from an early point, though, and I think I was one of very few kids who got the Greek references.

I read some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom books early on (they were in the grandparental house of family friends), alongside Robin Hood and Ivanhoe, and various forms of the Matter of Britain, and of course Narnia. Well before that, I had read through Enid Blyton’s frankly rather weird Faraway Tree books, a sort of Land of Oz pastiche filtered through early-mid-twentieth-century British culture and possibly some psychedelics. In looking up the series, it seems that only the overall concept of a gigantic tree leading to many places really stuck, but then that also describes Yggdrasil in the Planescape setting. I know I read John Masefield’s The Box of Delights around this time too, but not The Midnight Folk until much later (and the BBC TV series, which I have literally discovered exists while looking up the book, has some peculiarly familiar sequences, although I would swear I’d never seen it before). We had the Chronicles of Prydain toys that came in Kellog’s Cornflakes packets, but neither the books nor the movie made it to me before I was way older. An aunt gave me and my brothers some of the Star Wars figures (two ewoks, Darth Vader and Chewbacca) way before we ever saw the films. Some friends had Transformers toys; I don’t think I had any until much, much later. I also didn’t see any of the comics or cartoons until much later, just the TV ads for the toys.

Superhero comics weren’t really an available thing, but Eagle was available, and I know the Doomlord storyline stuck solidly in my mind. I also have an odd conviction that the Wildcats comic was out before 1988, because I “remember” reading it before my mother’s death in December of 1987 - I’m almost certainly conflating it with something else, although I can’t at present imagine what. Eagle’s Survival strip (kids in a world where adults have been killed off by a disease) also stuck in my head in odd ways, and made me treat the later in-school reading of Lord of the Flies with rather more scepticism than the rest of my class. And I must have encountered the Battle comic at some stage, because the Storm Force strip from it is also embedded around that level.

More fuzzily, I know I had seen images of mecha somewhere by the age of 8, because I remember trying to build one from beehive frames and a go-cart chassis in the workshop in Camolin, and we moved out of there shortly before my ninth birthday. Around the same time, I know I carefully put together skeletal remnants of birds and rabbits, and while I don’t think I had any serious expectation of re-animating them, I gave it a go. My concept around that was “cute skeletal pet” more than “horrifying necromantic abomination”, and I honestly have no notion where that came from.

I know that I and a school friend got out VHS tapes from his local video rental shop and watched them. I’m pretty sure Ghostbusters was one of those. The Terminator was probably another. I know his older brother confiscated one that had a recommended viewing age on it which was well above our ages, possibly added together. I have no memory of what that actually was, just the indignance with which we protested. And I saw Splash at a different friend’s house, and was somewhat puzzled by how prosaic it was about mermaids (I also had to go digging just now to get the title of Splash, because it definitely wasn’t in any accessible part of my memory, and seems to have become confused, at least partially, with Desperately Seeking Susan).

All of that was before the age of 10 or 11. Sometime around then, I bought Terry Pratchett’s Wyrd Sisters and Raymond E. Feist’s Magician (the original, badly edited one) on the same day, and from there I was into a more coherent fantasy universe, wherein there was intended form and rules, and not just a mix of stuff. But I think my expectations had been set before that, and to some degree remain so.

I know the fascination with colony ships and fleeing destroyed worlds (a concept that comes up in my own writing and games frequently) is pretty directly from Wildcats, and a lot of the very basic images I have around ships and travel from place to place in fantasy comes from a combination of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and some sequences in The Box of Delights. Masefield is also responsible for a lot of my feeling about dreams in fiction, crossing genres, big old houses, and the concepts of guardianship and responsibility, which is a lot for a kids’ book from 1935. And in retrospect, I wonder if Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising wasn’t influenced by it as well, although I didn’t discover her work until my late teens.

The Barsoom books definitely set some visual concepts in place early on - the Martian aircraft in particular, and the term “sky raft”, although I’m not sure it actually occurs in the books. A combination of Burroughs’ Mars and the Dark Crystal documentary led to a nameless paracosm constructed in sandpit-constructed canyons with chunks of slate for roads and slabs of pine-bark operating as aircraft, carrying cargoes of fuchsia berries and yellow flag pods, and with the Star Wars figures as pilots and inhabitants. Some elements of that are still in my head too. Weirdly, perhaps, the persistent lack of clothes in the books didn’t make it into my head at all, and I only noticed it on re-reading them shortly before the film John Carter was released.

Ghostbusters gave me the concept of entrapping spirits, and might even be responsible for the unholy love of undead that players in every game I’ve run since have noted. I suspect it’s also responsible for some of the ideas that surface around the crossover between science and magic, and I definitely associate it with spell diagrams, although I couldn’t say for certain there are any in the film itself. The Terminator (along with The Box of Delights, again) is probably to blame for my fascination with time travel - I know most people associate Back to the Future more strongly with that, but I didn’t see that until later. The Terminator robot itself crosses over a bit with John Storm from Storm Force in my head, and accounts for a lot of my interest in the human/machine (or later, human/magical armour) interface.

Ulysses 31 is to blame in large part for my fascination with retellings. Huge chunks of my writing and games are conscious remixes and reskinnings of myths and other stories because of that, and it and the few episodes of He-man, together with King Arthur’s Excalibur, have made magical or technological swords, and the transformation of their wielders, a mainstay of my visual library.

Some of the people who’ve played in games I’ve run are probably - if they’re familiar with the source materials I’ve pointed at - wondering if I have any original ideas at all, and I’m not sure I really do. But then, I’m not sure anyone has had any really original ideas since about Babylonian times.

I had forgotten the pleasures of tinkering around with a profile and an interests list. You'd think that would be an obvious feature for Zuckbook, but it doesn't seem to be.

Yet another I-am-going-to-post-more-here!-post.

Alright. I have more or less removed myself from Facebook, except for the groups I need to have access to make my SCA stuff go. I'll find ways to escape those over time, but having bookmarked the groups and not having to look at the feed is already reducing the irritation with the internet. Oddly, Twitter doesn't do the same thing; it can certainly be rage-inducing, but that's because of the stuff I see happening via it, not the stuff happening on it.

So the next trick is to write stuff here, and occasionally poke other people into doing the same. Several of us are doing this at the same time, so that should provide some ongoing encouragement. And I need to update the various profile bits and make them into something that aligns better with me now than with me a decade or more ago. That'll come soon. Meantime, onward, with a daily-entry-type thing in the next post, and we'll see how long that keeps rolling.

But I gotta say that being able to type HTML and have it go is an incredibly comfortable thing. I'd forgotten.

So, what do you think of Star Trek: Discovery?

Comments may contain spoilers. Since it's available worldwide at a time of your choosing, and if you can see any of it, you can see all of it, I have less than the usual level of sympathy for spoiler complaints.

I am on Dreamwidth under the same account name. I haven't used it in donkey's years, but may consider adding it to the permanently open tabs if enough people are moving there.

These are from the three parts of the recent European Tour: Drachenwald's Summer Coronation in Germany, the International Medival Congress in Leeds, UK, and Cudgel War in Finland.

Slow-flowing water
Woodsmoke through descending dark
Fireflies in woodland

Words between scholars
Common ground uncovered
Mind overflowing

Dry heat in darkness
Wood and gravel underfoot
Lake water is cold

This is an entry for the Failbetter Games Zee Shanty competition. Sadly, it's limited to 100 words, so you only get two verses of it.

Oh, a bottle of the Willow wouldn't do us any harm,
An' a dark and dewy cherry wouldn't send us to the farm,
An' a rubbery lump or two wouldn't raise any alarm,
An’ you’ll all hang on behind!

[Chorus]
Send me down to Wolfstack and then pressgang me to sea,[x3]
An' you'll all hang on behind!

And the scatter of the bats there is a grand old sight to see,
Them bats are damnéd lucky when you're putting out to zee,
An' I'll meet the Likely Lass there if she's only meeting me,
An’ you’ll all hang on behind!

This is Item 3 in the December Review of Books What Drew Read In 2015, which is proceeding slowly, but proceeding all the same. Dave Hutchinson appears not to be able to decide whether he's a David or a Dave, or more likely his publishers can't decide - I've seen both on different covers.

Europe in Autumn is, I think, the most notable book I've read this year. I don't know that it's the best, because that's a difficult judgement at the best of times, but it's the one about which I have thought the most while not reading it, and I read it three times. Spoilers, as ever, follow.

( Spoilers Ahoy )

This is Item 2 in the December Review of Books What Drew Read In 2015. Jo Walton is one of my very favourite authors, and I will pretty much automatically buy anything she publishes.

This is commentary, not a review, and probably contains spoilers.

( Contains spoilers )

I'll be posting some book reviews (or at least commentaries) during December. To tide you over in the meantime, though, here's a piece I wrote on changes I'm expecting in the next 50 years.

I know that I am finished with all the writing, studying, etc. I am not yet in the state of mind where I can think of other things to do as things I can do now, as opposed to their still being things I can do at some later point. The actual results will be out later in the summer, and I am intensely relaxed with regard to them. The overall result will be a good 2.1, or if one of the dissertations got very good marks, maybe a first. Either is good. Either will get me into the MA in Local History in Maynooth, which is my current vague intention - but I will not be entering that until Autumn 2016 at the very earliest, and possibly not for another year after that.

I am developing a mental list of projects, which will become a physical or least electronic list of projects in the reasonably near future. It will include things like getting back to various RPGs, writing a paper for a conference in the summer, getting myself to inbox zero, various DIY things, a number of SCA craft projects, getting considerably fitter and losing some of the belly, getting armour together, getting into it and re-authorising as a heavy fighter, finding a place for archery practice in Dublin, and stepping up as Kingdom Social Media Officer for Drachenwald in June.

I also plan to have more of a presence on various blogs and so forth, although that's a plan I've had before.

What's notably absent from the list of projects is an MMO. I thought long and hard about getting back into Wurm Online, which I love, or EVE, likewise, or even some other MMO that people I know are playing. But they are such incredible timesinks that I don't think I can justify it; it would be one, or two, or three evenings a week going into something that has no output, and probably has an overall negative impact on my health. I may well continue to dip into Neverwinter once in a while, because it's free and takes no ongoing commitment, but other than that, computer games will be the offline sort with a distinct end point.

Those are the Sunchase Brothers.
The woman behind them is Wild Marge.
She's eighty-two, and looks it, but she claims
That she danced in temples when she was younger.
The elder brother is called Stone,
The younger Junior. They're twins, they say,
But Stone aged himself twenty years by accident.
Junior's forty, if he's a day.
Once, Wild Marge was hungover - she employs them
To taste the vodka she distils,
But that night she drank it herself -
And the brothers went into battle by themselves.
They were having fun at first,
But Stone got bored.
He leaped up on his brother's shoulders, and shouted,
"Run away! Or I shall take off my eye-patch!"
And he began to lift it with his thumb.
The enemy ran away. Stone chortled,
And went to find something to drink.