Duke Street Alley

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.

Livejournal is back on the default tabs in my browser. I've been checking in from time to time, but there's something about the content here which is distinctly different to most other social networks, and it's also old and comfortable.

So here's what I'm doing these days, as a sort of general update.

I'm still working in Elucidate, where I'm the Online Marketing Manager. It's a small consultancy company, so I don't get to do much with our own marketing; most of my time goes on clients. Clients vary from very tiny companies who have our services via prize funds up to the national Post Office, An Post. The work suits me very well indeed, I'm largely self-directed within the parameters of the projects I work on, and very often I get to try very cool and interesting new stuff in Adwords, social media, or other bits of onlineness.

We've returned to the SCA. I had a bit of time that wasn't accounted for, and I knew a number of people who were interested in the hobby, but weren't about to investigate without knowing someone involved. So I went to an event, and went to a shire meeting, and lo! I am now Chatelaine for Dun in Mara, and dragging the shire firmly into the 21st century, social media, regular updates, and actually doing stuff. I'm ably abetted in this by sabayone and the rest of my newly formed SCAdian household. Aside from the Chatelaine-ing, I'm doing heavy combat (re-assembling armour bit by bit at the moment) and some A&S stuff, including calligraphy, horticulture, and the making of my own garb, which, let me tell you, is pretty terrifying and also very pleasing.

I'm doing a BA in Humanities in DCU's Oscail Programme. The setup is that you can do between 1 and 4 modules a year, in six subjects, with a few other restrictions on which modules you can take at the same time. When you've done twelve modules, it turns into a degree. 4 modules per year would be a full undergrad course-load; I'm doing 3. I did foundation level courses in Sociology, History, and Literature last year, and I'm doing a more advanced module in History and two in Literature this year.

Studying is difficult when you've done none for three months and it's not an easy introductory course, but I'm getting the hang of it again. I sit down at the kitchen table three evenings a week, and one weekend day, and hammer through the reading and comprehension necessary, and I'll soon be starting the first set of assignments. I really like studying, even when it's tough going.

I'm also running a couple of tabletop RPG campaigns, one weekly, the others less regularly as time allows.

We got a dog, too. Isambard Kingdom Spaniel is a black cocker spaniel. He's mostly past the chewing people phase, and will probably finish the chewing things phase soon. He tries very hard to be a Good Dog, but the details are still a bit fuzzy. He caused some serious stress by breaking out of the back yard on a regular basis, but we've now turned the place into something only marginally less secure than Fort Knox, unless you happen to have opposable thumbs. He gets walks twice daily, and I think he may be coming into his power as a rain god.

And I'm learning to drive, gardening, doing some necessary bits of DIY, playing Skyrim on the XBox and Wurm Online on the PC, my usual amateur meteorology, blogging in various places, and watching some odd bits of TV (Wartime Farm, Parade's End, Arrow, and until the end of the half-series there, Doctor Who) here and there as time allows.

So. What're you at?

K2 is this weekend. On Sunday, I will be cooking a large pot of chili, which will be served with rice, sour cream, and whatever other bits of appropriate side dishes I can find. It will not be very hot - no hotter than an average Chinese takeaway curry, say.

Should you wish to partake, let me know before Friday afternoon, with a comment here, that you will hand me a fiver to cover costs at some point over the weekend. giftederic gets it free because he paid for it in Gaelcon's charity auction, and bastun_ie is trading haggis. I am open to other such deals, of course.

Also, if you know someone who's not on LJ, but wishes to partake anyway, this entry will accept anonymous comments, so they can still comment here and let me know.

In which a week-long trip to Wales is more or less summarised:

We arrived over on the Saturday, having got up early for the ferry. Leaving Dublin was, as always, fascinating; you can see bits of the city you never otherwise do. The crossing was calm and steady and almost completely foggy; I can't judge distances well at sea and in fog, but I'd guess visibility was well under 100m. Coming into Holyhead, it was still foggy.

Holyhead is a grim little town. I don't know what they do to it, but it feels like Trainspotters was shot there. Nevertheless, we were very amused, on the way out of the port, to be passed by a car with a huge window decal for Ensiferum, the same very obscure metal band whose tshirt I was wearing.

We drove down as far as Caernarfon, and stopped to get some groceries and poke around a bit. We were standing in a parking garage staring at the ticket machine (pay in advance, coins only, of which we had none at that stage) when a woman leaving the car park leaned out the window and said, "Would you like a ticket? There's about an hour on it." A very nice welcome to Wales. Poking around a bit revealed several bookshops, one of which was second-hand, vast, and specialising in books about outdoor adventure and exploration. Their all-books-£1-6-for-£5 was an excellent selection; I managed to only hand over £3. We scouted the castle, and parking for it, got the groceries, and also some lunch in a fairly ordinary Chinese, and headed on toward the Lleyn.

Navigation got a little bit interesting after we passed Clynnog Fawr. The instructions said to look for Gryn Goch, a village which is more a short row of houses, and then for a left about half a mile after, just after a safety barrier. We spotted what looked like a likely left, and tried it, but it rapidly went into a near vertical ascent, and left us at the top of a cul-de-sac of the kind which made turning interesting. sabayone is very good at these things, though, and managed it with a minimum of effort.

The next left - which was, indeed, after a clearly visible safety barrier - turned out to be the correct one, and we found the cottage. Trydden Hywel is lovely. There's the old cottage, of which the walls are the best end of a metre thick, which contains the sitting room, and the two bedrooms, and then the kitchen and bathroom are in lean-to extensions. It is far and away the best equipped self-catering place I've ever stayed in; there has as yet been no kitchen implement I've wanted and not found, there are cookery books, plant and bird books, guide books, maps, a beginner's guide to Welsh, a host of novels, cd player, dvd player, flatscreen tv with an impressive array of channels, a pair of bincoculars, and even a stack of boardgames, cds, and dvds to match nearly any possible taste.

After we'd established where everything was, we walked back down to Clynnog Fawr to get some other odds and ends. There are footpaths all the way, which fascinates me; this is a very rural road, and yet there's provision for pedestrians along all of it. CF itself is a small village, with a rather impressive church, and we're told by the guidebook, a dolmen, though we haven't seen that yet. There's one shop, attached to petrol station.

On the way down, we saw what looked like a bird of prey hovering and gliding down nearer the sea. We've since worked out that it was a buzzard, and they're rather common around here; we've seen the same one again and at least two more.

On Sunday morning, we roused ourselves from the very comfortable bed, briefly visited a Sunday market in Pwlheli, which wasn't all that, and toddled off to Beddgelert to start a 10km walk, marked as "Easy" in the Collins ramblers book. The route over was impressively mountainous; twists and turns and the chance to casually look over a roadside wall and down on the back of a soaring buzzard. There are some very fine ruins up there as well.

Beddgelert is a very touristy village, but with good reason; it's very pretty indeed. The walk, on the map, went down the river, through a gorge, around into an old mining valley, up to the head of that, down the next valley to a lake, and back around to the starting point. It did that in reality as well, but failed to mention that the haul up the old mining valley - Cym Bychan - was a long, long upward slog over occasionally boggy terrain, and that the descent to the lake on other side was very steep. In fact, the guidebook says it isn't particularly steep. I'd love to see their definition of 'steep', and possibly also of 'easy', because we were both knackered after it. It was an excellent walk, though, and immensely varied, and the views, particularly down over the lake, Llyn Dinas, were fantastic.

We debated driving home to eat, and also the possibility of eating there. In the end, we looked for and found a table in a very odd little bistro/antique shop, where most of the specials menu consisted of game. I had pigeon, sabayone had pheasant, and it was all excellent. Homeward, then, via Carnarfon rather than the mountain road.

On Monday, we walked down to the local beach, a few kilometres along it, and back up to the house, which was a lengthier ramble than expected, but also very pleasing. We took it easy for the rest of the evening, cooking, eating outside, and watching an impressive sunset over the sea.

[The above was written on Tuesday morning, I think. It's now Saturday evening, and we're back in Ireland. I shall attempt to reconstruct what we else did, although the order in which things were done is getting fuzzy.]

We went to the Wednesday market in Pwlheli, which was better by a considerable amount than the Sunday one, and acquired goods for dinner, and went to a small fishmonger's/deli, in which we got red mullet and anchovies. The mullets ended up being fried, and they were superb.

We drove down to the end of the Lleyn peninsula, being mostly unimpressed by it on the way, and then very pleased with the village nearly right at the end, Aberdaeron, which has a sheltered beach (well covered in stranded jellyfish, which we stepped around), and then being stunned on the way back by the view from the village of Rhiw, from which you can see all the way back up the peninsula, and into Snowdonia for good measure.

There was a massive storm one of the nights, which left trees and branches down all over, and brought the owner of the cottage up in the morning to check if we a) had power, and b) hadn't had a tree come down on us or the car. We'd been inside the metre-thick walls, and hadn't thought it was all that bad. Apparently, there were thousands of places up and down the coast left without power, and we saw trees down all over the place over the next two days.

We visited Chester, wherein I was very pleased by the walls and by the second gallery level of the streets in the older parts of town, while at the same time bemoaning the effect whereby, due to chains of shops, every town in England is now effectively the same. There is a very good old-style sweet shop opposite the cathedral, though, which was well worth the investigation.

We also did a drive up Llanberis Pass, and back through Beddgelert, Tremadog, and back up to the cottage. Llanberis runs past Snowdon on the "far side", from our point of view, so we circled the mountain, even if we didn't as much as consider climbing it. It does appear to attract bad weather; there was almost always an area of rain and heavy cloud in about a six, seven mile radius centred on the mountain itself. This does give rise to some fabulous waterfalls coming down the sides of steep glacial valleys, though.

And we visited Caernarfon castle, which I recommend to everyone, as long as you can handle lots of steps. For the first time ever, I got the museum effect from a castle - the one where I run out of attention span, and have to leave and go do something else, because the cool-stuff-to-look-at buffer is full.

North Wales does not appear to do good pubs. There were pubs, certainly, but they had a distinct impression of having learned how to be pubs from a book, or possibly a correspondence course. A randomly chosen pub in Chester was superior to every pub we saw in Wales. This seems, having done some reading, to be due to the principle of sobriety being a strong one in the Nonconformist religious traditions of the area.

There's also evidence to suggest that the reaction to rock in Wales has historically been to take a pick to it, on an industrial scale, and Wales is made of rock. There isn't a single valley that hasn't signs of slate quarrying, copper mining, lead or tin mining, or other extraction of stuff from the ground.

It was an excellent trip. We were trying to pick out the best bits today on the way home, and kept coming up with more and more new ones.

I'm writing this on the iPhone while I wait for the train. It's not the most comfortable way to write, but it's better than the alpha-numeric keypad. You didn't get a daily entry yesterday, mostly because sestina writing ate my spare time.

So, Monday was a blur of work, and Tuesday was very similar. It's the last week of the month, so time is being spent filling in the gaps, and doing some training with the Intern. He's getting better; still not quite understanding things sometimes, but he has more patience than I do for the slow, uninspiring work of link acquisition, for example. He did a day of pretty much nothing else yesterday, which would have driven me spare.

Monday evening saw some gardening done - watering and weeding, for the most part. Everything is growing well, with the exception of the pumpkins, of which there's one straggly, slug-eaten example showing.

Yesterday evening was largely spent online, talking to people and getting some game writing lined up. And this morning, sabayone is off with a cold, so I'm taking the train in.

I see the hawthorn - the May flower - is in full blast. This year is running late on everything; it would normally be headed for over by now. In other weather signs, I was observing an oak and ash near each other; the oak is in full leaf while the ash is still working on it. That's supposed to indicate a good summer.

Posted via Journaler.

Nine years ago today, sabayone and I had our first wedding. This was the legal one, in the registry office.

I would like to thank her enormously for putting up with me for nine years (and indeed, a good while before that). I love her enormously, and reckon she is the best thing in this or any other world.

Someone was remarking at K2 that I'd been quieter than usual online. I think I stared at them through a haze of beer and game rules, and indeed, I do not now remember who they were. However, they were probably correct in terms of output visible to them. It's difficult to keep track of what I'm doing unless you're on all the services I use, and that's not easy either. Further, a lot of my day-to-day communication goes out on an IRC channel with about twelve people on it, and doesn't really get further transmission. Nevertheless, here's my current usage:

Facebook: I'm not really using Facebook, to be honest. I log in once in a while to check the inbox and confirm any friend requests that are not from completely unknown people, and occasionally scan feeds for people I have no other contact with, but I don't read the whole feed.

Livejournal: I read a lot here, though I no longer try to read everything. I've learned to distinguish between the notions of "I want this person to have access to my journal" and "I want to read everything this person writes", and I'm making that distinction. I post when I have something to say that doesn't go on my other blogs.

Twitter: I love Twitter. It's a global chatroom, where I can filter down to the people I want to listen to, and the conversations between them. Twitter is currently my "main input" stream, alongside Google Reader.

Buzz: I am not making much use of Buzz at the moment. This may change once I have time to work out what it does better than Twitter. At the moment, it seems to include material from people I don't know, sometimes in quite long chunks of text, and that's not interesting. Buzz appears to suffer from several of the geek social fallacies, particularly #4.

Google Reader: This is currently one of my two main inputs. RSS feeds into Reader provide me with about two to three hundred chunky items to read every day, which is just about comfortable. My podcasts also come in here, allowing me to pick and choose which episodes I download.

Wave: Wave is great for event planning and project management. It's not a general communications tool, though.

Email, Inbox: Baseline contact form, this. I don't use email for much these days beyond password messages, the occasional newsletter, and very rarely getting in touch with people who don't respond to anything else.

Email, Mailing Lists: I have not looked at mailing lists much in months. They pile up, I occasionally look at them, but mostly, they don't contain content of interest any more.

Text Messages: I'm not sure where I stand on texts. On the one hand, they're a convenient way to get messages in transit. On the other, they're easy to miss unless I'm actually looking at the phone, and most of the time when I'm in transit, I'm not doing so - I'm reading, listening to podcasts, or plotting something nefarious.

Phone Calls: Yurk. The more I use the phone for work - which is quite a lot - the more I dislike it outside of work. Send me a text or email instead, unless you need an answer right now. Also, be aware that if it's between 07:30 and 09:00, or 17:30 and 19:00, I may not hear the phone ringing.

IM: I have an IRC channel populated with a number of my favourite people. This is an excellent thing. Other than that, IM is seeing very little use from me at the moment. It requires attention in the moment - and if I'm at a computer, chances are I am concentrating on something else. In most cases, it falls into the gap between email and phone conversations - if you need an answer now, phone, if not, email will do fine.

MMOs: Of course MMOs are a communications channel. However, I'm not playing much of any of them at the moment, mostly due to not having time to spare. When I am on, it's on EQII, EVE (in brief bursts), occasionally on WoW, and on Allods, when it hasn't broken itself by patching.

I am not in the shiniest of moods right at the moment. Nothing is wrong in any major way, but an accumulation of minor things - work stresses (largely other people's), the icy-slippy-surface-but-no-longer-snowy weather, the fact that the water is still off here three days after we first noticed, and the difficulty of scheduling games, among others - are putting me into a state where I'm more easily annoyed than usual. So this thinking about The Future goes under a cut tag, because it's probably rather bleak for most people's tastes.

( The Future )

This entry is not f-locked, and I'd welcome contributions from people not on my friends list. Anonymous, untracked comments are enabled, as usual, although I'll be keeping an eye on them.

Incidentally, I feel much better for getting that entry out of my system.

I'm not entirely sure I've ever posted a video before, but this is just far too good to miss.

I am rarely aware of my own accent. I know it's there, and I know it sounds vaguely Irish to most non-Irish people, and vaguely non-Irish weird to the Irish, and sometimes archaic to everyone. I have always used 'ye' as the second-person plural, for instance, instead of the more modern Hiberno-English 'yous' or 'yiz'.

However, in the progress of a recent Living And the Dead session, I noticed that due to accents, only sabayone and shootbambi can pronounced the word 'realm' correctly every time. olethros, carawyn and I always insert an extra vowel - a sort of mini-u - between the l and the m. utterlymundane, being a well-spoken young fellow, gets it right about two attempts in three, but falls on the third hurdle.

Myself, I seem to be physically incapable of excising that extra vowel - and now that I've noticed it in my own speech, I can't un-hear it. Terribly irritating.