Bunny of the Day

Had another idea for a story I'm not going to write.

Yes, I do think of lots of ideas outside of the already-created worlds of others. Fanfiction ideas are, however, easier to explain.

(For instance...there was a real moment in history when Lenin tried out the experimental musical instrument of a certain Leon Theremin. According to onlookers he was "surprisingly good." Now put a fictional concert violinist in that audience and let him hear the uncanny music from this electronic violin and catch a glimpse of the future racing in all streamlined and chromed -- and realizing that even the dangerously intelligent Lenin is of nothing to a man who's very name means "steel"... I'm not going to write it, because first I'd have to sit down for ten years with histories of Russia).

So here's today's bunny.

Harry Potter universe, 1946. I've started to hate Sorting Hat scenes because I really dislike the entire idea of the Houses. I love challenging the rules. I love out-of-context problems -- crossovers provide these in spades -- even if they tend to break the original universe.

1946 and off the Hogwart's Express come four first-year students -- siblings -- who refuse to be broken up. Who don't even adhere to normalcy in their timing, as they are of different ages. They work as a well-honed team and are surprisingly talented with the sword and other unusual skills and can draw upon a poise and gravitas that should only come with full adulthood in a position of power.

Because once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia.

And that's pretty much it. Tweaking the HP universe. But this is also deconstruction of CS Lewis and The Problem With Susan and all and as uncomfortable as the situation may be to the Pevensies -- yet more reminders of a full and well-lived life yanked away from them by the caprices of gods and fate -- they make everyone else even more uncomfortable.

Because, really, four Narnian kings -- even without The Lion backing them up -- are damned scary. They break everything about Hogwarts just by being there. Not by magic, not by some sort of extra-narrative rule, just by being in character.

Especially if you follow through (if you are more honest than Lewis was willing to be with his creation).

Brane and brane, what is "brane?!"

Been sick and staying in reading. Somehow found myself reading fanfics. Several fanfics. Set in the same universe. And reading them simultaneously.

So I'm basically flipping back and forth between multiple alternate worlds, having to adjust with each page with an, "Right, this is the one where they don't have brooms yet, but she's older and he's a girl. Or is this the one where everyone is a pony?"

In want-of-a-nail fashion a unique narrative spins away from every jonbar hinge, each step of the plot creating a new set of potential universes and discarding a previous. This is true of every book; every path not taken leaves a wondering horse. Reading a dozen simultaneous branches at once just emphasizes the process.

Being fanfic, every work must be a traceable variation on a single cantus firmus, that Earth One of the original work. And being fanfic, parallel evolution features more frequently than one might expect; the plot drifts back to that invisible melody like a long jazz solo winding up -- if only to hit certain well-known and well-beloved moments of the original in an exercise fanfic commentators have called doing the Stations of the Cross.

As with alternate history, there may be clockwork airships overhead and a sea monster in the Thames but there will always be a Queen Victoria. (One is tempted to say there will always be airships, but that's another issue.)



And that's my insight today. Historical fiction shares with fanfiction and serialized fiction the mingled joys of the surprising and the familiar. 

You come to an episode of Buffy to be in the company of Wills, Xander, Cordy, Mr. Giles, and of course the Buffmeister again. You delight in the familiar, even as you expect to be shown something new and exciting as well. In a well-written series even the familiar ground will become more detailed over time, with season delivering a little more backstory, a little more character development, a little more nuance.

And this is why there is a Sorting Hat song in hundreds, thousands of fan-written stories. Even if the song itself is unique. The cantus firmus is not the song, it is the singing hat. (And I'm really looking forward to the story where Harry is sorted in Hufflepuff and the 'puffs get to demonstrate that Nice is not Weak but anyhow.)

When a reader decides to open a book set in a historical period, they frequently (but not always) expect to find something familiar. Readers drawn to history know history. And specialize. If they opened your book on the life of Seti I then they probably know something about Ancient Egypt.

That reader also expects to find something new. They want to learn -- or, at least, be surprised. This may be why Alternate History works so well. It is the familiar pieces, but re-arranged for freshness; Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, as the Vulcans would say.




Well, the second is going to be easy. The moment your book says, "Here's some Sea People, here's the siege of Wilusa," then you are writing an original take, one single splintered mirror of a reality largely lost to history. There isn't a consensus of historical opinion to diverge from, not here.

Which makes the first the more useful question for now. What are the touchstones for the Late Bronze Age? What familiar places is the reader hoping to see?

Is this just fantasy?

One year to first draft was the plan. Six months for basic research and outlining.

After four months I'm relatively certain that the original ideas either don't fit the real history or would be too difficult to pull off. That's as close as I've come to outlining the plot.

I looked at trends and genre classifications and what I've brought home from that is largely what I went in with; that there exists a contract with the reader, expectations that the book should try and fulfill. But I don't know what these might be.

I've followed a few attractive leads but I can't even say I've decided they are dead ends. It would be amusing to treat my Mycenaean mercenary as a displaced Homeric hero, applying classical Greek ideals to a rather different situation, for instance. And it is still a problem for research and a risk of going astray from what I really want to achieve.

Last week it was sort of historo-cultural thinking. The purpose of the book might be exploring the Bronze Age Collapse and trying to discover the reasons for it. And or the nature of the mysterious Sea Peoples. Trouble is, the locals don't know they are living in a Collapse. And the Sea Peoples? One of the things that makes them so frustratingly mysterious to us is the way period references strongly suggest that they were so well known there wasn't any reason to go into detail about them!

The Medinet Habu inscriptions aren't, "mysterious raiders from the sea!" they are more like, "goddamn, it's those guys again."

This week I'm thinking in terms of the Quest novel, which tends towards travelogue. With the point being if I can identify cool places to see, cool peoples to visit, cool things to do I might be able to arrange those like islands and then fill in around them as necessary.

Unfortunately it's a small list so far. I'd like to play barrow wights and looted weapons in a Tholos tomb. I'd like to do a little North by Northwest with some Hatti chariots against my protagonists. I really do want to see some of New Kingdom Egypt despite it being a real pain to do in so many ways.

And there's three other things that keep growing detail as I think about them, even as two of them may be impossible to fit into a reasonable plot. There's a confrontation with a god -- worse, a sort of sister of Eris, a being that even the other Greek gods are scared of. But I can't really make it work, and as I work on the rest of the story it seems more and more out of place with the rest. There's the Trojan War. I'm really liking it as something more than a move by some loot-hungry Mycenae, more a plot and counter-plot between Hittite and Kaska and others over the Luwian territories, with Mycenae on both sides of the fight. Leading to a small-scale anabasis as following the sack of Troy one band of warriors has to struggle their way down the coast through increasingly unfriendly territories (especially if they are just beating the Philistine/Sea Peoples en route).

The big problem with this one is the timing. Specifically, information timing. There are things I want the Egyptian scribe and eventual "head" of the party to learn in sequence. And I also want to develop the understanding of the reader about the collapse. And, to, give them a chance to experience the glories of the palatial age before it all starts coming apart at the seams.

And lastly there's the scene on the boat. Probably pirate, possibly more organized raider (aka Sea Peoples -- whatever that means!) With the Scribe and the Cretan girl acting out tropes of classical-era comedy (the drunken master, the clever slave) to keep the pirates entertained, whilst the exhausted mercenaries watch their dangerous game and try not to get involved, and a seemingly harmless Phoenician watches with too-astute eyes and is in turn studiously ignored by the pirates...

In the end, I think the road to my plot is going to look like the road to the Bronze Age Collapse. No single cause is sufficient. Instead it is a combination of things.

I put 150,000 words of fanfiction down playing in an attempted splice of the worlds of Stargate and Tomb Raider.  I learned there the joys of research and the joys of history, and how to very efficiently turn raw research into prose. I also decided I am not fond of compressed text and info-dumps and that reaction, too, will get folded into what I do in this new novel.

From the same source, from spending so much time (via extensive podcasts) in the company of working archaeologists, comes a renewed intent to be honest to real history. Fortunately the Bronze Age Collapse is not a terribly fertile ground for the science wars. We really don't know a lot of key details. That sort of takes the sting out of telling a story where it was the fault of zombies. Or the Sea People were all Deep Ones.

Somewhere along there, though, I realized that watching a city burn on the horizon is no way to understand and experience the history. Fortunately, the idea of wandering sword-swinging heroes who pass by on their way to their own goals (whether selfish or world-saving), doesn't on examination match up with most actual examples. Even in an open-world RPG the characters get involved. They go into a community, pick sides in a local conflict, learn and become in turn part of the story there.

Which does mean, though, my inchoate thoughts of viewing Ugarit from a distance or Mycenae merely as ruins is not going to work. I really do have to get down into those places and cultures. And that's gonna take a lot more research than I had hoped to have to undertake.

Because it has become increasingly clear. As much as I have tried to seek out the most opinionated, polemic works, the worst I have found are still reluctant to commit. The Peleset have been identified by many with the Philistines, and they appear to have settled near modern-day Palestine, but the language is unknown, the origin unknown, the influence and/or connection to Mycenae unknown, and plenty of writers reject the whole thing anyhow.

So for me to say this is how this town looks, this is what they speak, this is who invaded them, and so forth, I need to be familiar with at least some number of the various primary sources and other texts used by the people who are currently theorizing about them. I can not, for this book, take whatever is up that day on Wikipedia and run with it as "good enough." I have to be historian myself, and come up with my own hypothesis.

A Little Night (Vision) Music

The Khajiit piece was a really poor choice for my first experiment in recording.

My vision has been to largely create with virtual instruments (aka MIDI) with recordings of real instruments folded in where possible. That was one of my goals in learning violin and, yes, penny whistle. The best thing I can say about the Khajiit piece is, due to the peculiarities of the arrangement, I can perform all the parts on physical instruments.

This is also one of the downsides. It depends on my performance, in every instrument above. There's no place I can use a keyboard or a drum track to give more of a gloss.

I would have done better with a jazz piece. See, this is almost a tone poem, using instruments coloristically. And that makes the parts very hard to perform. The thing that a more standard setting gives you is a well-defined rhythm and well-defined harmonic structure. Having that bass and drums behinds you pulls you along in the right meter and on to the right pitches. The Khajiit parts, instead, sort of float out there -- as witnessed by the fact I found it as easy if not easier to record some of them in isolation to nothing but a metronome track.

Most of this has been using the extremely basic Behringer U-control USB interface that came with my MIDI keyboard, with an AudioBuddy pre-amp and phantom power unit in front of it. I tried recording a couple of the violin tracks at work; I brought a Zoom recorder with me to the shop, and dialed up a metronome application on the iPhone.

Everything gets assembled in Reaper:

That's barely a quarter of the tracks there. Another disadvantage to this piece; it is all about changing tone colors, meaning I'm basically playing in little more than a couple bars at a time. There's not really a chance to get into the flow of the piece and the performance I'm trying to contribute to the mix. Just do my best to stay within the tempo and hit the right notes.

At the moment I'm at ukulele (my $40 Rogue) standing in for lute; plucked, slow-strummed, and fast-strummed with ras accents. There may be more. Violin (my student-model Pfetchner) in sustained lines and in some improvised harmonics for a spooky effect. Bodhran (my Pakistani-made 18" tune-able) with tipper, rolls, fingertip, scratching and brushing, and stick accents. The wooden soprano recorder I've had since childhood and a Yamaha ABS alto. Crumhorn (a sadly out of pitch Susato in brown ABS), and shawm (a bombarde from Lark in the Morning at Fisherman's Wharf, sporting a badly fit oboe reed these days).

So, back to working method. I imported the original version of the song into Reaper as track one. Then went through my libraries to find virtual instruments (instruments I could play from the MIDI keyboard) with similar sounds to those physical instruments I would be recording.

The opening riff was just a matter of using my ear and matching what was on the original recording. The "theme" was more difficult; as the original was spoke-sung, I had to go into notation mode, type in the lyrics, and line those up in time with the original recording. Then I could work out a melody track that sort-of echoed the speech patterns of the original, and stayed somewhere in range of the chord structure.

Since there are sections of multi-part harmony I worked that out here, too. Actually, I disliked the violin harmony and when I was at the shop recording those parts I took out some music paper and worked out new voice leading there. A not-small advantage of this technique is I can play the mock-up of the part back and learn the line by ear from there (I'm still not much of a sight-reader).



So call it a noble experiment. I'm still nowhere near ready to embark on the big Tomb Raider piece I have in mind. So I'm hunting around now for something jazzy. Something with a more straight-forward rhythm and harmonic progression I can really feel like I'm jamming to when I record in the parts. And, yeah...maybe something with a trumpet part or two.

Blue Horn Project

About three weeks.

That, for me, was how long to get to the point where I felt like I was playing tunes instead of struggling through exercises. The violin is truly the outlier here. It took six months to be in enough control of the bow and the fretting to think about assaying a tune.

Actually, my measure is a little different and a little more subtle. It is the "arbitrary tune" measure. Strictly speaking, the tunes aren't arbitrary, but it is the point where you take something you remember and try to play it by ear. See, "Twinkle Twinkle" and similar exercise pieces are chosen and/or designed to stay within a limited scope. On the violin, that's two strings, three stops, first position only. The equivalent starter trumpet piece would put you all within the same slot, two slots at the max.

I'm working the Grand March from Aida right now (that is, the melody, by ear) because it is a lovely slotting exercise. Big sections are just dancing back and forth between slots with just the first valve going up and down. I may not be smooth at it but it isn't a "crippled" piece designed for the student.



Okay, three weeks is also my personal measure, and won't hold for everyone. I've messed around with a post horn and blew a few notes once. I've worked with recorder and crumhorn and penny whistle so tonguing a note is already second nature, I have the breath control, and it is just one more set of fingering to memorize. For that matter, two of those instruments are overblow instruments.

Which is not exactly the same as changing partials on the trumpet. You do have to blow harder, but that is due to the real change you are making; pursing your lips tighter. After all, even I already have a two-octave range, with all the accidentals, and there's only three valves. The rest is all by changing partials.





Incidentally, the Bodhran was something like thirty minutes to find the basic stroke, and three hours to start the triplet going. I've put in about ten hours on it at this point. Unlike the trumpet and violin I don't have to take rest breaks to recover.

That's the terrible secret to trumpet, as it is with adult violin. Your lips simply do not last. When I started I could only practice for five minutes at a stretch. I'm up to fifteen now, but I can only do that two or three times a day. So looking at the number of days spent is not a good measure of the hours expended.

Oh, yeah, and I've cleaned it thoroughly twice and I pull and clean out the valves once a week.




However. I haven't made much progress on the Khajiit piece and I'm feeling less and less skilled by the minute. Or, rather, by the YouTube video -- lately I've been watching some crazy cover bands that do 20's jazz version of 80's pop hits. I've been around musicians. I hung out with a bunch back in high school, I worked sound for years. I am nothing but envious. I can sort of knock out something on an instrument or two but I am no musician. Not yet, and from the progress so far, not ever.

(As one more plot point on the graph, I've been playing piano since I was a teen. And, no, I'm still not very good. I've learned how to practice smart, and get as much as I can out of less than ideal practice -- time, and little things like lack of access to a good practice room -- but I really don't seem to have "it.")

Watch this (Maker) Space

TechShop may be having a Mark Twain moment.

However, far from there being a "rumor" of its demise, it was the CEO who sent a mass emailing and open letter to the Maker community in which he stated Chapter 7 had been filed, the company was dissolved, and the assets were now in the hands of the court.

As of a week ago there's a new email drifting around (which much smaller circulation*) in which that same CEO says they've sold the company and it will arise anew as TechShop 2.0. And oh yeah; they didn't actually file the Chapter 7.

Ahhiyawa!

I think it was Mark Twain who said the world lost a perfectly good swear word when H. Rider Haggard chose to name a character "Umslopogaas." I've found myself saying "Ahhiyawa!" recently. But, really, half the names given on the funerary inscription of Ramses III at Medinet Habu would make pretty good swears as well.

Yes; "Ahhiyawan" is probably "Achaean" in yet another language (peoples of the Bronze Age had more names than a character in a Russian Novel), but where are they? Apparently in Southern Anatolia. Umm...isn't Greece, like, the other direction?

Welcome to the Late Bronze Age. As the potential itinerary of my novel expands, I've been having to read up on the Hatti (sorry...Hittites), Mitani, Khasa, Philistines, Phoenicians, Scythians, Assyrians, Babylonians (plus the various "neo" Assyrian and Babylonian empires), Canaan in general and outliers like the Ugaritic civilization...and that isn't the end of the list, I just got tired of typing.

And, yeah, Troy is back on the table. As Wilusa, of course. If there's anyone in ca 1190 BCE who even thinks that little siege would make a really spectacular story, they still haven't gotten around to adding random gods and damsels to the mix. Nor a wooden horse. They have no inkling at all that centuries later there's going to be Romans claiming descent from a survivor, and oh yeah if some old guy is still trying to row his boat back across the Aegean they haven't been talking about that yet, either.

A quick browse through the Kindle archives and there's at least two works of (recent) historical fiction set in Wilusa. Or at least starting there. Dunno if Homer is nodding or rolling but there it is.

So I started researching dates. And the first realization is that the progress of the Bronze Age Collapse can be roughly placed in three stages, with the middle one -- the time my story is set -- being as short as five years.

I could indeed cover most of the hot spots within a couple of years. It would be possible for someone to fight at Wilusa, observe the fall of Ugarit, visit the ruins of Mycenae, and still get back to the Nile Delta in time for Ramses III's big party.

(The other realization is more like a deepening appreciation for how much we still don't know and how much sources disagree. Boy do sources disagree. And that's after you take into account the huge changes that have been happening since the 90's and basically accelerating since; within this decade good data is finally starting to come out of Turkish and former Soviet Union excavations.)



Except that's also a change in plan on my part. It is a complex path I took to get there, but one of the big things to fold in is that many of the peoples moving about are refugees, not pirate gangs. Even in the inscription at Medinet Habu some of the attacking "Sea Peoples" are shown with families and oxen and everything else you need to do the Anatevka walk into a new land.

Match this with a peculiarity of the destruction in several places; that the palatial centers, the ostentatiously expensive palaces and temples and noble houses are the ones that got burned. And the reduced population continued to live in more or less the same area. This doesn't sound like an invasion.

It sounds like a peasant revolt. In any case, how ever you read it, I'm not seeing the massacre by Ramses III as being the happy ending.

As We Stumble Along

Started recording parts and the only thing keeping from despair at how poorly it is going is the realization of just how much I'm trying to do for the first time.

I've recorded parts into MIDI before. I've almost never tried to record instrumental performances of my own. Certainly not to a click track. So this is basically the first time I'm playing along with someone else (even if the "someone else" is the previously recorded tracks).

And not all the tone colors work. I mixed sound for live bands for a few years but this is the first time in which I am having to make the overall musical decisions. It isn't just the placement of the microphone, but how hard to pluck, how far sul tasto to place the bow, where to place the tone hand on the bodhran. It isn't that easy to hear, not while also playing the parts in.

But the biggest disappointment is how ragged I am. How obviously uncomfortable, how much I struggle just to get through the instrumental line without error, with little left over to bring out expression and nuance.

Of course I'm doing a multi-instrumental recording that includes instruments I've held for less than a month. So I don't have the comfort -- the chops -- to let me go on automatic and leave me free to following the beat, hitting necessary accents, adjusting tonal qualities, etc.  This is the downside to not practicing four hours a day.

(I do have that kind of practice on the recorder. Which isn't as helpful as it could be in part because of the crazy accidentals of this D, E, D#, Cm chord progression, but even more because, drat it, the recorder parts I wrote are neither idiomatic nor play to my strengths on that instrument.)

But, actually, it ain't that bad. The violin performance is particularly bad but I had pretty much zero rehearsal on it. And even the crumhorn sort of does the job, at least after a lot of EQ. (The patch I was using to simulate it in the mock-up had more of a low end presence, substituting as it is for a low synth pad in the original song).

On the technical side, crashed the Powerbook once. Chased around a terrible lag and finally solved it by turning Chrome off (it was fighting with Reaper over the audio drivers, apparently). Using some of my old mic collection through an external phantom power/pre-amp and a cheap Behringer USB interface. I really, really miss my Pro37 condenser, though. It just had a magic touch on so many instruments. The only positive comment I can make on the mics is the MK1000 kick mic does a nice job on the bodhran.

I think I'm going to move some of the recording to my workplace for a quieter and more importantly more private environment where I can take the mute off the violin and back up the mic. Close-mic is not really the right trick for some of these sounds, and I really don't need to be worrying what the neighbors think in addition to all my other performance stresses.

Arsenic (Bronze) and Old Lace

Novel is giving me a hard time.

I came close to making a sketch for a prologue scene. Idea one was a pair of scribes working on the famous letter from the King of Ugarit in which he pleads for aid against the ship-borne raiders who are burning his country.

Idea two was the death of my Mycenaean's mentor in battle when someone breaks position in the formation. Except. Did they fight in formation at the time? The phalanx hadn't been officially invented, but formation is more the rule than not, and those shields look appropriate and oh boy I've still got a lot of research to do before I can actually write even a damned sketch.

(And the former idea, although easy enough to pull off from the research materials I already have available, highlights its own problem. Which is that between the Scribe, the Seer, the role of magical texts, and the importance to the plot of the Medinet Habu inscriptions, writing -- ancient languages -- are going to be a really big part of this. And I just don't have those chops.)



I like the characters. I've been living with them in my head long enough for them to really flesh themselves out. But I still haven't picked the settings, or nailed down the plot.

A recent thought is that they never actually make it back to Pi-Ramses. This would save me from having to do massive research on cities and palaces and armies of the New Kingdom. I could have the seer character "read" the Medinet Habu inscriptions instead, as a coda. And that moves the climax to Scythia, without having to confront a god then go racing back across the Ancient World to get to Egypt before 1170.

And that means I can take the characters out of their setting. Over the last lonely stages of their trek far from the centers of the Ancient World, they can change in ways that make them no longer the playthings of gods -- allowing that climactic confrontation to at least make some kind of sense. I know I said I didn't want them to move from their own setting, and certainly not to suddenly have all this future technology and tactics and (worse yet) modern attitudes, but I sort of like having them learn through the seer material from the Classical age, as well as other world cultures, and within their own tight private circle of the four of them develop along philosophical and moral lines that are entirely unique.

Anyhow, it's a thought.

(And, yeah, I really want to do Tale of Setne and have a journey into Duat. So that makes the plotting of the pivotal chapters...confusing.)



My main research task at this point has got to be charting every single date (or rather, range of dates) I can find on the key events I feel I want to reference or be influenced by; the fall of Ugarit and Mycenae, for instance. And also draw up my own map that highlights the possible places of interest and puts in as much as I can discover about what the possible political state, cultural make-up, travel routes, etc. are in each of these places.

And maybe when I look at those charts some kind of plot will start to make sense.

And maybe when I've plotted out the high points, I'll have a manageable list of research topics.

It's all driving me to put the thing aside for a couple weeks while I catch my breath. Maybe finish off the Tomb Raider/SG1 crossover fanfic while I'm at it. Figuring out what is under Mount Shasta is starting to sound simple....

Origin of Species

The Khajiit piece is coming along. Went to a concert of Early Music last night and it has given me ideas.

Mostly about counterpoint...most of the songs performed last night were tenorlieder, in which the outer voices dress a melody held in the tenor voice. Pity I don't have a tenor recorder, and my Susato crumhorn in quality brown ABS plastic is not really suitable for a lyrical line (I can play one, and in theory it fits -- the cat in Prokovfiev's Peter and the Wolf is performed by a low-register clarinet, but in practice the sound is just a little too silly.)



The Bodhran also arrived yesterday. I'm not making a video of that one for the "How long does it take?" series, though. Within an hour or two I could perform the parts I'd written (well...I'd intentionally written parts I was pretty sure I could learn). Before the afternoon was done I also had a pretty good start on the Bodhran triplet.

But then, that series is kind of a fail. First off, I don't have the patience to properly script and edit video (plus I was going for the immediacy and honesty of showing what it really sounds -- and looks -- like when you are struggling with an instrument for the first time.) So it is rambling and semi-coherent (much like this blog).

Second is the question is far too open-ended. "How long does it take to learn to play?" is the perennial question, and the only real answer is, "The rest of your life."

How good is "good enough?" I have been theorizing that there is a fuzzy line you cross where you actually feel like you are playing a melody as opposed to struggling through a technical exercise. But on reflection, I think the question is better turned on it's head; "How bad do you sound after n hours?" Would you be willing to let a friend listen to you after six hours? Would you rather wait six weeks? How long before you tried to play with someone else, in a band, or record?

The other fail is that I'm not a complete noob. I've been messing around with instruments for a long time. I've struck a variety of drums in my life, including as much as a hundred hours on the pads of my electronic drum set. So bouncing a stick off a membrane and getting a good tone is not new territory for me.

The U-bass was a similar exercise. I've never played bass, but I've a couple years of ukulele already. So I'm not starting from ground zero. And in all cases, I have a smattering of music theory, experience in how instruments are supposed to sound (from recording and mixing them), and decades of experience with other complicated manual motions from various sorts of tool and craft use. "Hold it this way and turn your hand this way and then apply pressure like this" is not a terrifying new prospect. It's just one more set of muscle memories to absorb.

And, yeah, the trumpet. I've tried to get a tone from a horn in the past, messed with it enough to be able to get two partials out of a post horn. And I also knew the theory. But the trumpet brings up another problem with the "how long does it take?" question. Because you can practice for a week, but your actual practice time is only a couple of hours.

The reason is, the first hurdle to the trumpet is building strength in your embouchure. You literally can not practice for more than five minutes at a time, and twenty minutes in a day is pushing it. Your muscles fatigue after that and there's nothing more that can or should be done with that instrument that day.

The violin is similar in that getting that rotation -- particularly as an adult -- is bad enough that wrist and shoulder and neck and back strain show up quite rapidly. The pain is enough to mess with your concentration after fifteen minutes. Even now, I get sore if I try to push past thirty minutes without a break. So the time you spent in "days" is not really indicative of the total effort.

(That's not counting watching instructional videos, doing finger exercises, reading up, cleaning and maintaining the instrument, and so forth).



And that also means it isn't actually that silly to be practicing four or five instruments at once. Particularly since I'm practicing the actual instrumental lines I mean to start recording within the week.

Xenephon's Cravat

I'm very much on with "Five Senses" writing. Isaac Asimov made a long and fruitful career without describing as much as the color of a character's hair, but I gravitate towards fiction with enough look and feel to make me feel as much physically embedded in the setting as I am intellectually engaged with the story.

This is not always the easiest stuff to research, especially as one moves back in time. It is also not the easiest thing to describe. The colors in a sunset or the odors of a cooking fire are easy enough to translate to modern eyes and nostrils, but how does one economically carry across design motifs, clothing styles, technologies?

This is exacerbated by the fact that it is much easier to find the name "khopesh" or "krater" than it is to find out how heavy it is, how it breaks, how it smells, how to carry it; in short, all the five-senses stuff that is at the forefront of the experience of someone actually living around and using these things. The name is of use mostly to those who are cataloging them, so of course so many sources both contemporary and modern tend towards lists of names.

Names are also an often necessary short-hand. In a modern-day setting the writer can say "Paris" or "Taxi" or "Starbuck's Coffee" without having to explain and describe. The look and feel comes across to the reader because they have their own sensory experience with the thing to draw upon. Or at least have encountered sufficient other descriptions to be able to fill in.

But for those things which are not modern (or referred to frequently within modern contexts?) Well, there's one peculiarity to note right off. There appear to be certain genres or periods -- Victorian era and Roman era leap to mind -- where part of the contract with the reader is an assumption that the reader knows what a cravat, a Hansom Cab, a spatha, a legate is. And there are sufficient depictions so said reader can get a little of the five-senses impression of how loud, uncomfortable, effective, powerful, etc. these things are, in addition to the general size and shape and color.

This is not like, say, shogun, samurai, kimono and katana, which are more-or-less assumed to be part of our general cultural knowledge (as inaccurate as common understanding of these things might be). This is instead a special expectation; that someone drawn to stories set around Rome or with a Lost Legion on patrol will know or will make an effort to know what the lorica and gladius are and have at least some idea what it means to be a Roman.

I'm pretty sure the Bronze Age isn't one of these exceptions. So the names alone are insufficient. The names are often problematic anyhow. For every wonderfully expressive, essentially self-translating term like "ox-hide ingot," you have two like "krater" that need translation, and two like "stirrup jar" that seem useful until you realize stirrups hadn't been invented yet.

This latter is a tremendous problem for the writer. Not only do many terms in English have specific, known (and therefor culturally inappropriate) origins, so do individual words. "The point of no return" comes from aviation, "running the gauntlet" came to English in the 17th century and had a Swedish origin (although there is a Greek equivalent, "Xylokopia," that just puts it back into the other problem of needing translation.)

You need to catch as many of them as you can, because once the reader's attention is attracted, they are going to realize how many of the words you are using in an ordinary 20th century English-language text are quite obviously derived from other languages, and that brings up too many questions you don't want them to have.

I ran into this during Shirato when I wanted to mention a certain blue glow but "Cherenkov" is both a personal name and the name of a Russian. Which didn't fit at all with my pseudo-Japanese setting. It yanks the reader out of the text while the ordinary anglo-saxon (despite its also complex cultural origins) sneaks by unremarked.

And what do you do with something like "Wanax?" It is the appropriate name of a Mycenaean ruler of the palatial period. It is similar to "king" but there are important differences. Put "King" in the book and the reader will make certain assumptions that don't fit the culture under discussion. But put "Wanax" and you have to explain it, slowing the narrative. Or -- from a later period -- there is the entirely appropriate word "tyrant," which was applied then without the pejorative sense we give it today thus would, again, require explanation.

I'm willing to bet there is no global rule. Each item has to be approached on a case-by-case basis. "King" will do because we're not going to meet many of them, but "Basileus" (which is a later Greek transliteration of a fortunately quite similar Mycenaean term) is a better match for the former functionaries/local governors who during the LHIIIC phase of Mycenaean culture take over from the fallen palaces and morph over the years into local chieftains/warlords.

"Khopesh" is fine because it is vaguely familiar to the audience and (vowels aside) is a faithful recreation of the Egyptian "ḫpš."  "Naue-II" is out because it is obviously an academic coinage and contains the name of the German archaeologist who categorized them. Since they were traded all over the place there are probably some authentic names for them out there, but as that doesn't help visualize them it would be best to describe them from an in-universe point of view; "One of the long narrow swords that had come out of the North in recent years."

And, yeah; this little game is even harder when it comes to the names of entire peoples. I am perhaps fortunate that in the period I am writing few have a national identity per se; they are mostly tribal, with a certain affiliation towards cities in some places. My Mycenaean may self-identify as Athenian, for instance; Athana or perhaps Athenai goes back as a city name to at least the late Bronze Age. My Laconian is less lucky, as his people (quite possibly Mycenae fleeing from the collapse of the palatial system) didn't move from the lower Peloponnese into Laconia until a few hundred years later.

And of course "Egypt" is a modern transliteration of classical Greek; the earlier Linear B inscription is "a-ku-pi-ti-yo" which possibly derived from the Amarna-period name "Hikuptah." Which is back to the original naming problem; "Egypt" is expressive but wrong, but "Hikuptah" would take a bunch of explanation. The one advantage I have in my particular story is my characters are a polyglot bunch; the moment one of them says one name, another will correct or amplify with the name that their people use!

Just as well the Bronze Age is not one of the periods with a special dispensation. Because this research is tough enough without having to face those critical and well-informed readerships.

TechShop RIP

I can't say I didn't see it coming. When I gave them a thousand bucks for the current year's membership I did so reluctantly aware they might not last the year.

What I didn't expect -- what no-one expected -- is that one Wednesday morning their loyal members would find the doors locked, no-one answering the phone...nothing but a (belated) email later that afternoon explaining that they had filed Chapter 7 and no longer existed as a company.

Yes, I understand why the members were kept in the dark. They were still hoping to find an investor or strike a bargain. But on sober reflection I don't sympathize. The above translates as, "We were in such dire financial shape we had to hide our books from the suckers we were trying to entice to give us more money, so of course we had to lie to our own members lest they give the truth away."

So, yeah. I feel betrayed.

It was a useless effort anyway. When I realized TechShop was in trouble I went web surfing and everywhere I found future investors hanging out, they all knew damn well (and in better depth and detail than I did) how bad off TechShop was.




It might have been smarter to be open and lay out exactly what they were dealing with. The kind of help they needed went beyond finding some random guy in Dubai to send them an infusion of cash. They needed a restructuring, they needed a better business model.

But I have to wonder if this wasn't almost implicit in shape of the very thing we were trying to preserve. TechShop was Maker. It ran on the philosophy of throwing it together. A sort of laissez-faire approach to building where doing it the right way or even the safe way was de-emphasized in favor of experiment and originality and the freedom to fail.

I loved the hands-off approach. TechShop gave you just enough instruction to get started and at least know the obvious ways to cut your own hands off, then let you alone to study, learn, and make your own mistakes. The alternatives I've looked at are much more about the "community," with a touchy-feely atmosphere so strong it makes you look around for the Kool-aid. If you wanted to come in at ten at night, speak to no-one, log into the machine and make a few cuts TechShop was the place to be.

The thing that I will miss most is the multitude of options. Sure, I can get access to many of the operations and some of the machines. I can send away to Ponoko to laser. I can get printing done at Shapeways. I can build my own mini vacuum-former and I can do some machining at the machines at work. But this isn't the same as having all those tools right there to hand.

When TechShop was open I could laser off a little bit bit of material or even a stencil or whatever. Now it is either wait two weeks for Ponoko or use hand-cut with X-acto knives and what-not or simply find some other (probably less efficient) way of achieving the desired effect. I was just that day contemplating using the Brother CNC embroidery machine for a possible project -- that's how I found out within a few hours of the closure.

It is a more flexible, nimble, exploratory way of working. Having daily access also better supports iteration; you can try out ideas knowing that you can run off an improved part the next day. Having to mail off a file and wait two weeks for delivery (plus paying the money for the service) seriously constrains that.

The part I regret most is all of the leveling up. I found all the collectables, I finished the side quests, and I unlocked so much. Which is to say, I took (and paid a lot of money for) a great many Safety and Basic Use classes. CNC mill, CNC router, 3d printer, laser scanner, laser engraver, metal lathe, wood lathe...  That is all waste. The classes are far too introductory to be considered worthwhile general instruction in that tool, and they are too site-specific to save me anything at somewhere like, say, Crucible -- meaning more time and more money to get back to having full access to the same tools.




What could they have done differently? Well, for one thing they were badly organized and badly managed. And their crisis response was to do more of the same. When they saw budget shortfalls they spent less on maintenance and salaries and started shorting their own instructors. Which is to say; they removed value from the thing they were trying to sell in the first place. They also ran endless promotions, which besides bringing in short-term cash at the cost of long-term income (membership specials that over the long run brought in less than the cost of maintaining that membership) raised a pervasive odor of desperation.

I would have gladly paid more. I'm not sure how many other members would agree, but perhaps if they had been open about their books we might have. I'm also not sure it would have been enough.

Let me attempt a back-of-the-envelop here. Assume capital investment in the actual machines on the order of 20K per "machine," a half-dozen machines in four generalized groupings -- call it 20 and apply another 20 worth of smaller tools and supplies. So that's 800K to be amortized over ten years of service life before you need to spend an equivalent amount in replacement or repair. Double that annual cost to 160K to cover staffing, utilities, etc. (And that's probably an understatement; even with the expense of these tools I could easily see their amortization working out to only a quarter of the total annual costs).

I'd say there were fifty people there most times I've visited, with capacity say a hundred. That allows a standing membership of 400-800. Being generous, the latter 800 members would have to pay...$2,000 annually. Which isn't that far off (their Makers Fair specials ran that number down to just below $1k, but to compensate monthly members pay about %140).

I suspect strongly my numbers are far too low both on ongoing maintenance costs for the equipment and staffing costs. So...would I have spent 4K for a membership? Perhaps.

I'm going to also assume that classes are a wash; they money they bring in should go into decent pay for the instructors, because you want quality instructors but the class prices are about as high as anyone wants to go. Also, quality instructors means you could expand past the SBU's and start offering proper in-depth instruction for those that wanted it.




But here's where the model that works for me stumbles into the question of the actual market. And I have some deeply pessimistic ideas about that. I've noticed at other corners of the generalized Maker sphere that the emphasis is on "getting your feet wet." Everyone is offering introductory classes, introductory kits, first-time user specials.

Which is great, and also links into STEAM and the focus on getting more young people started into actually building things again. Leaving aside the gripe that so many of these kits and classes seem more about the illusion of building things -- the Arduino equivalent of a Paint-By-Numbers kit -- I keep getting the sensation that the biggest problem the Make movement faces is retention.

By which I mean I suspect a great many more people are "getting their feet wet" than who actually end up swimming. So that model of yearly members bringing in a steady cash flow may be wrong. It may be that many of the people at TechShop come in for a month, a week, even a single class. Or send their kid there on a STEAM outreach program. And maybe print something or do a couple name tags on the laser printer but don't stay.

And, sure, the typical cycle for the serious user/entrepreneur is to go three to five years during development and growth: until they can afford their own machines and don't need to continue paying membership. I suspect particularly the generalist (like me) is very much the minority. I made "props." Most people coming in on a regular basis are making "product" and they rapidly narrow down to just one or two machines that they do most of the work on (and can as their business grows afford to own themselves).

There's also the impression among some that there are members thriving on the atmosphere. Like investment bankers soaking in the artsiness of live-work loft spaces, they come to park on a table with their laptops and the free wifi and coffee like a more tech-centric Starbucks. Like the Paint-By-Numbers above, I keep getting this impression of people doing the sizzle and not the steak. Of putting on the beret but never actually touching paint.

Because, honestly, if you are young and hungry what you want is investors. Looking like the next Steve Jobs is a lot more important than actually soldering anything. So TechShop functions in this way as a combination meeting ground, bullpen, source of inspiration and photogenic backdrop.




And myself? I don't know.  This is a music week -- I did complete my bass case and post up a new Instructable (which already got Editor's Pick) but basically I'm playing, not building. The only reason I even looked in on TechShop yesterday was about an idea I had for a Bodhran case.

Am I phasing back out of prop work? Am I going to go in different directions? I don't know. About the only thing I'm sure of is none of the other maker spaces in the Bay Area look that attractive. They almost all seem small and ingrown and very clubby, with a sort of shipping pallet and cinderblock earnestness that only really works for the young and hip and at least slightly delusional.

The only offering that exudes any kind of professionalism is the Crucible, and they take it to the other extreme; serious fees, serious classes, and the pervasive impression I get from them is you don't dare think about doing your own machining until you've done five years of apprenticeship under the eagle gaze of the senior members. Plus they are mostly about fire and glass and metal and although I've flirted with the idea of casting it isn't enough to draw me there.

Really, I miss my lasers. (And the vacuum-form machine, and a lathe I didn't have to fight over).

My Dog Has Fleas

My first solo recording project is an acoustic rendition of Miracle of Sound's Khajiit Like to Sneak (a comical look at some gameplay elements of the massive RPG Skyrim.)

I've been playing a Khajiit bard, so it occurred to do a cover of this piece using instruments not entirely unlike the bardic collection; lute, end-blown flute, hand drum, etc. The Khajiit accent and cultural trappings are vaguely Arabic and/or Spanish (perhaps Moorish Spain?) to the extent that the extant (third-party) collection of Khajiit songs uses classical guitar. So there's that to fold in, too.

And one big problem; the original song is spoke-sung, meaning it can be notated for time but not for pitch. Fortunately someone posted the underlying chord form up at one of the big guitar tab sites (even if I'm not sure they got it quite right). So I have some guide to possible pitches.

The other angle of attack -- and again I've forgotten the proper musical term -- is using the implied pitch of vowel sounds; like the ukulele mnemonic I've used for my post title. "Khajiit," for instance, implies a medium-sized interval with the lower note first.




Over the past few days I've worked up a MIDI mock-up, using patches that sound similar to the instrumentation I have available, making sure to stay within the actual note range, and practicing to see if I can actually play the ideas I'm writing out.

I've solved the basic orchestration issues. I have sounds that work well together. Now the two-fold task is capturing more of the accents and changes of the original (particularly the rhythmic accents), and fold in more early music and/or Flamenco references (I'm limited to what I can actually play on "guitar" -- actually, a ukulele with leather pick standing in for lute with plectrum -- but I do have a few techniques like rasgueado that I can use).

Of course a major element is going to be bodhran drumming, which I have yet to even start learning!

After that is general tightening. This mock-up is entirely internal; I'm using it as a guide and click track to record the actual parts. The more I problem-solve in MIDI, however, the easier the process is going to be.

The big problem-solve left is voicing in the Recorder section. My first idea was to use a Recorder Consort, interwoven lines performed on SATB (despite only owning sopranino, soprano, and alto recorders myself...they get rapidly more expensive as they get deeper in pitch). It still sort of seems like it will work, but it has been a long time since I studied voice leading and species and so forth.

This is the only place where I'm going dots on a line (at least, until I prepare the parts for recording). I already went to notation for the melody. Borrowing a technique I used extensively for theatrical sound effects I imported the original song into the Reaper file and synchronized the metronome. Then I was able to type out lyrics in the notation view and make sure they lined up accurately with the original vocals. With that, and the chords as a guide, I could come up with pitches that sort of worked.

And that's where I'm going to collect the three or four Recorder lines so I can make sure they are properly outlining the underlying chord progression. This is the sort of thing I did on paper way back long ago. I have a new booklet of staff paper but as with so many things these days it works well enough on the computer.

It still bugs me that the original is really using time and texture to express its ideas, but once you add melody there is inherently a focus on tonal and harmonic elements. Well...I'll see how it goes as I try to clean it up and focus it in better on the important ideas.

Frantic Activity

I forget who said about the swan: that it looks so serene gliding across the water, but under the surface there's all this frantic activity. That seems to apply to a lot of things, musical instruments included. In the case of brass and many of the woodwinds, what the serenity of the resulting melodic line hides is the intense physical effort involved. It takes a ridiculous amount of pressure to even get through the first octave.

It is a different sort of difficulty than that of violin. For violin, the movements are so necessarily precise you have to concentrate intensely no matter how simple the melodic line appears. For brass, there are most certainly nuances, but for the beginning brass player it is all about the physical stamina.

(Well, it is a learning thing. The better my embouchure gets -- and the stronger my lip muscles get -- the less force I have to put behind my breath. And the better the tone as well. That's what's causing the octaves to slowly open up. I'm getting the fifth partial already, and it's been a little over a week).

Of course the piece I'm working on now is all recorder and crumhorn....and bodhran.




The bass case is complete. I'd give it a B+ for concept, maybe even A-, but a D- for execution. It looks ugly, but it works well enough to tote the bass back and forth. But I still haven't gotten around to repairing/replacing the built-in pre-amp so I haven't been getting much practice on it.

So I don't know if I want to do an Instructable on a hybrid case off that example. I may have to wait and make another case. But the next one I might try vacuum-form and expanding foam as techniques...

A Bridge Too Far: MOH Airborne

Airborne is the 11th installment of the perennial Medal Of Honor series of first-person shooters, and joins a still remarkably small number of games with historical settings; this one being of course World War II.

The ravening horde shouting out unintelligible insults had taken over the FPS genre at this point; it has a rather short "campaign" mode to concentrate it's energies on multiplayer (and as with so many games, the servers crashed on opening day and there were weeks of game-crippling issues with that multiplayer mode).

For the single-player campaign, you play as a low-ranking (eventually buck Corporal) soldier in the 82d named Boyd Travers. And as his clone, as any time you get killed between checkpoints a new "you" parachutes in to take up where you left off.

An unusual and fun mechanic in the game is that you make a combat drop into each new map with a steerable parachute. Not quite sandbox, it still means you can chose what order to take objectives, or even land somewhere completely random and proceed to screw with the game a little.

In the usual FPS mode you get a choice of two long arms, a pistol, and grenades. You can at various times swap out either of the long arms with what you find lying on the ground. And here's my first problem; with the exception of the panzerfaust, all the weapons as depicted are so vastly similar there's little reason to care which you are using.

Older weapons in real life are a lot less consistent. Some are bolt action, some have detachable magazines, some are notoriously unreliable; there's a lot to learn and you really shouldn't be able to just pick one off the battlefield and start shooting. Or find the right ammunition just lying on the ground.

Case in point; at various points a Gammon Bomb (which the game calls a Gammon Grenade) is added to your armory. Which cooks off and throws just like any other grenade. Well, the Gammon had a unique fusing system in which an unwinding strip of linen cloth armed an impact fuse. It should at least look -- and really play -- different. Heck, the game doesn't (as far as I can tell) even give a range advantage with the potato masher, which is pretty much the point of that long wooden handle.

I don't know if you really want to be modeling having to, say, run the bolt with every shot, much less have to go through some multi-button routine to shove a stripper clip through the top -- but then, many FPS already have a gun mechanic where you have to hold down multiple buttons to go into sight mode and shoot. In any case, I'd like something to make the weapons more distinct than just having a different sound and a different HUD model.

This ties into the hands-off philosophy so many of these games have with history. The writers cared about the period, did their research, and had a good consultant. It all looks great. But you as player engage so little with it. At least it is appropriate for Airborne soldiers to be carrying a huge armory around with them. There's a particularly famous picture of one with anti-tank, at least three other guns, and a blanket and poncho as well. But basically this is the FPS mantra; whether it is historically accurate or appropriate to the setting the player must have their four basic weapons groups.

Of course, what I'd really want is a game where you could talk to locals, go on pass between operations, swap stories with your buddies, spend time in hospital. But that's not going to happen, not even on AAA budgets. Mostly. I mean; Skyrim allows you to explore, engage in conversation (stilted as it can often be), even set up as a shopkeeper and put the sword down for good. I'm not asking for a game where you play as Anne and spend the war in an attic, but I do wish for more engagement.

In any case, the ruins are fun and look appropriate (but then, MOH have had eleven games and about as many years to learn how to model and render good-looking debris). The AI are mildly more interesting, as they seem more aware of their surrounding and even give hints of cooperating between each other. But alas, they fall prey like any other to my favorite FPS/3PS game of "confuse the AI." Just like in Tomb Raider, I could leave cover, sprint into their lines and cause the AI soldiers to spin in place as their tracking and pathfinding routines clashed.

And then beat them up with a potato masher. Amusingly enough, you get skill points for kills with a weapon even if you are doing melee with it. I think I got my first marksmanship badge with the pistol by pistol-whipping Italian irregulars behind their own barricades. Oh, right. After completing the main campaign once I went back through the first parts of the game determined to rely on the pistol and ignore the rest of the weapons. And also run around the battlefield like a maniac, which is how I got so intimately familiar with the respawn system.

It is a cover shooter, after all, with a rather cute "lean out of cover" mechanic that, alas, doesn't help against the increasingly skilled enemy shooters. As has been found in real war, the majority of bullet strikes are hands and head (the only parts exposed when you are trying to shoot from cover). The AI is aware enough to make sniper duels nicely challenging and give you a good sense of accomplishment.

The game somewhat goes off the rails in the later maps. Eventually you are fighting in a fantastical concrete warren that looks like a James Bond set against gas-masked black-uniformed super troopers who can take three shots to the head without going down and who advance on you terminator-like carrying a dismounted heavy machine gun. Accompanied by other gents who think a panzerfaust is an indoors weapon.

This is perhaps inevitable. You the player get more skilled as the game progresses, plus it has a skills system that does...something (weapons upgrades are most noticeable). So to make the later levels more difficult something has to be added. More enemy is the usual. Tougher enemy is the other. In the real world, the elite troops are elite because they know what the heck they are doing. They use cover better, they support each other better. Well, the AI is already running at its peak in the early game. The enemy can't get more skilled. So all they can get is weirdly armored. No matter how realism-breaking and un-historical that might be.

(They also in the real world get the better gear, but this is a negative advantage in the FPS world because anything they have, you can have for the price of a few bullets).

This is the sad truth of FPS, and the tired old AAA model. Time is money. To make a player spend money on a game you need to give them playing time in return. And the cheapest playing time comes from the variety and sort-of emergent behavior of AI opponents. Even an extensive dialog tree is only really novel once, and it takes a lot of time writing and recording voice talent and animating actors to achieve. Making a sprawling set that supports multiple strategies of engagement and then filling it with AI opponents is a mature technology, well-honed by the industry and familiar to the player.

Still, it plays well enough, looks fine, and there's at least a little sense of a past place and time.

So, that was a thing

Wired up all 200 feet of LED strip (it only took 3-4 hours). The hard part was calculating it all, spec'ing it all, making sure everything was actually going to work. So that's done and delivered.

Also finished the costume for my friend's kid. We didn't get to work on it on the weekend so that was a big push yesterday and today. That and being so tired yesterday I gave up around five and basically went to bed (woke up for dinner then went right back to sleep).

The best I can say for the costume is during the last push I finally started to remember what I was doing. It takes a while to blow the dust off skills you haven't used in a while. It all more-or-less worked but I'm sorry the version #2 (version #5 if you count the muslins) of the hood is a little too small. All the others were too big but somehow we overcompensated. Pity, because that medium canvass really drapes well, and I lined it and everything.

(In case you are wondering, that's a simplified Arrow Season One as a vest instead of a long-sleeve body suit. The hood-and-shoulders is detachable, strapping under the arms and velcro'd to either side of the zipper in front. The raw un-hemmed edge at the shoulders is one of the "tells" of that outfit, like the contrasting lining and the chevrons on the angled twill tape (done with iron-on patch material...I am not one to be afraid of expedient construction methods).



Means I am basically clear of favors and designs and other projects with deadlines and can go back to practicing violin and repairing my bass. And possibly shaping a bronze sword; there's a couple of people who offer a raw stone-cast bronze blade for reasonable bucks.

Someday you feed on a tree frog

Got in some good violin practice over the weekend. It took the first year to learn how to play a tune badly. The second year is all about playing a tune....not so badly. The pieces in my practice repertoire are there because they test the agility and accuracy of my fingering...some nice crosses, some slides, a little vibrato, etc.

I keep adding pieces I'd like to learn. The last couple that caught my eye, however, are brass-heavy. So I'm being very tempted to borrow a trumpet and find out how hard that is to play. As if penny whistle and bodhran weren't ambitious enough! (At least I already know recorder, and own half a consort already, so when I finally do work out the parts for the Khajiit piece I'll be ready for it.)

Well, I have a friend's costume to finish on Monday, and there's two hundred feet of LED strip rolling around the apartment that I'm wiring up for another friend. So there's enough already to keep me distracted.

That, and work. I have this terrible urge to climb a really, really long ladder....

So...there's an umlaut in Linear B?

I've reached a low point of confidence in the novel.

At this point, I know more about the Jason myth than a so-called professional writer who used that as the basis of a whole Tomb Raider novel. But I know significantly less about Homeric epic than your average Heavy Metal songwriter.

(This is not a joke. I just read an article in Amphora about the long relationship between Heavy Metal lyrics and themes and ancient history and myth. And not just Germanic, either. Apparently there are even epic-length songs about Alexander.)




Fortunately the Mycenae are not Greeks. Homer may have been casting his eye back into the Greek Dark Ages, but he as often as not described his Heroic Age in forms that were contemporary to him. There's a big difference in researching these two periods.

The classical world is a literate world. It is a world in which History exists. The earliest writings are mostly accounting, interrupted at long intervals by inflated claims of kings. The classical writers talked about themselves. Political and military analysis, philosophy, fiction. The amount of Greek writing available to the researcher today is staggering. It's also moving online and becoming more and more searchable, too.

Worse, through quirks of history literacy in classical languages was wide-spread for at least a hundred years. Many, many students and dilettantes and professors and professionals have sorted, interpreted, collected, codified, analyzed, extrapolated. If the amount of Greek and Latin writing available is staggering, the amount of writing about Greek and Latin writing is terrifying.

So if an author wants to set a scene among Plato's students on a hillside below the Parthenon there is a multitude of secondary sources that have already sorted out for you from the available clues in the primary literature what they would be wearing, what they would be eating, how they would address each other, etc.

Researching the Bronze Age throws you rather more prominently into those primary sources. Not to say there isn't extensive analysis and interpretation. There rather has to be, in part because the primary evidence is so much more sparse.

There's a couple of letters I have heard about so many times I even recognized when one was being referenced as a joke (a podcaster, speaking of the wealth of New Kingdom Egypt, said "gold was like sand." Which is a reference to a rather cranky letter from I believe a Hittite king that reads something like, "Why were you so stingy with your last gift? Are we not like brothers? Gold is like sand in your country, you only have to scoop it up. I'm building a new palace here, bro. Help me out.")

There's three shipwrecks that give so much information about trade in the Mediterranean I can practically recite their manifests by now. And for all the Tholos tombs, there's a handful of really indicative grave goods.

This sparsity, and the fact that these are mute indicators, not the pontifications of contemporaries, means you engage with primary sources as an archaeologist does in order to construct the world of your narrative.

And that means writing a book looks more and more like making a thesis defense. Or at least preparing for your orals.




There's another reason to be really familiar with the primary sources. A reason I'll go into in another post. And that's the name problem. If I was researching a scene set in Paris I'd be okay with discovering the names of the street, museum, metro stop, whatever. But due again to those historical flukes we have many names for things of the Bronze Age that are misleading, too modern, or just not right.

I don't even know if I want my Minoan character to self-identify as Minoan. She may have never heard of King Minos, and she certainly hasn't heard of Sir Arthur Evans. Unfortunately there's no Amarna letters for Minoan rulers. And we can't read their own writing. Best we've got is what the Egyptians may have called them, based on some medical texts.

One way to avoid the name problem is to describe. Either in alternative to or in addition to, portray the thing in question through what it looks like, how it is used, where it comes from. Instead of "He held a Naue-II" say "He held a long cut-and-thrust sword with a straight blade." Or more organically, "He thrust, using the reach of his long sword to advantage."

And that's why, in addition to sweating the research, I'm thinking about buying a sword.

Grading on a curve

Dracula is open. The LEDs are calculated and now it is up to the theater company to actually get around to purchasing them in time to install them. And I took most of today off to work on my friend's costume (I was really sleepy after being in rehearsal until almost midnight two nights running anyhow).

Vinyl (that's the generic term; you can call the embossed stuff pleather if you like and I usually do), is a real pain to sew. It alternately grabs and slips in the machine, bunching up at the slightest excuse. I sprayed the presser foot with silicone lubricant and that helps a little. A trick I just read about is to smear vaseline on the fabric just in front of the foot.

It also doesn't heal. You need to use a wide stitch or risk weakening the fabric so much it tears like a page from a memo pad. And you really don't want to cut open a seam and re-do it. You also don't want to pin anywhere but the selvage, which makes pinning even that much more pleasant.

Flattening the seams is almost worse. Because you can't press it. Only way is to glue. The one nice part is that if you glue a hem first, you can actually topstitch it for strength and looks without it going crazy on you.

But I also found out close to the end of the day that because it doesn't rebound the stitches end up loose, and you can't backstitch for strength because you'll just make a hole. Which means my seams were weak. Because my friend needed it for pictures I temporarily protected the seams with a few drops of fabric tack, but when I get it back I'm going to back all of them up with seam tape. Or bias tape and more glue (top stitching would be even nicer but I think it would look cluttered at this stage.

Interestingly enough, the actual show-used costume this is based on did no hems and all of the seams were "open," instead of stitching leather to leather they topstitched the leather to a black jersey knit. That gave the seams a little give for movement.

If I do another personal project with this material, I'll either use a similar trick or I'll do lapped seams. Or if I am lucky enough to have garment weight instead of the current upholstery weight, something like a flat-felled seam.




In any case, that's one more fixed-date deliverable off the table. Aside from lingering tasks with this LED thing I'm able to relax again. Just in time. My recovery from the last bout with the unknown illness was in danger of hitting a relapse if I had to keep up this week's crazy schedule.

Illuminated

Still sick, Dracula is looming, and got an emergency call from a lighting designer friend to help a friend of his "do a Broadway lighting effect on a community theater budget." So I've been deep in calculations on LED strips and not at all amused by the way most vendors won't tell you the wattage you are working with.

(LEDs are always prey to this. Vendors for individual LEDs love telling you mcd's -- milli-candela. Which are an area dependent measure thus can only be compared across LEDs with the same view angle. Strips, meanwhile, love to tell you how many LEDs total, to the extent that some don't even bother to tell you how long that particular strip is! And even when you get the data, the numbers don't always add up with what the vendor is claiming.)

And, yeah, was tempted by idea of rolling up my own 6-channel Power MOSFET DMX-512-speaking PWM board. But not this time; the show installs on the 1st and although I could design a board and get the PCBs fabbed on quick turn-around committing that kind of money without a chance to prototype and test is not a good idea.



On the novel, finished the first book on the Hittite Empire, half way through a book of tales from Ancient Egypt and getting deep into a collection of more academic papers on the late Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.

The characters are coming along. The more I read on Egyptian magic the more I like the Scribe character. He's pretty firmly in my mind a "crouching moron, hidden badass" type (to use the TVTropes term). Academic, geeky enthusiasm for old texts, can read anything (and speaks a few dozen languages as well). An unprepossessing body reminiscent of Amarna-period depictions, and gives no impression of martial prowess. But he's scary smart, Batman-level of prepared, and when he (reluctantly) whips out a magic spell...

The Mycenaean mercenary is coming along, too. He's sort of the audience POV, even though the culture he hails from has its own oddities. He's terribly steeped in honor codes and other aspects of what eventually gets recorded by Homer; he's a sort of a textbook of Heroic Age foibles, Achilles sulking in his tent and all.

The "Minoan" seer is giving me more trouble. Except for her gift. I've dreamed up an idea I haven't seen used elsewhere, an idea that could be a lot of fun even if it doesn't have any connection to any culture I've yet to study. And it fits in wonderfully with the way Egyptian magician-scholars of the tales come across quite a bit Indiana Jones, fighting their way into tombs to steal books of lost magic.

We forget that the past, too, has a past, and they were as fascinated as we are by long-passed cultures. After all, as the quote goes, the pyramids were older to Cleopatra than she is to us.

Ah, the Minoans. You got to envy the Hittites. See, all the common terms we have in Modern English for Egypt come down to us through the Greeks and Romans. The Minoans got hit later, with Sir Arthur Evans naming them after Greek myths. But the Hittites vanished from history. They weren't talked about by the Greeks, or by Roman Scholars, or by French or German or English speakers from the antiquarian age. They didn't (mostly!) get hit with labels given by scholars who were trying to see the world of the Christian Bible in everything.

They got discovered second-hand through the Amarna Letters. Through contemporary Egyptian writings, and then through their own writings. We didn't basically discover them until we'd gained the ability to read about them in their own words. So most of the names given to things Hittite are pretty much accurate transliterations of what they actually called them.

That's...unusual and lucky for most peoples, really. Especially when you are talking those on the losing side of history, the names we still use too often today are the names given by their wary neighbors, if not their conquerors. Names that translate far too readily into, "Slave," or "Our Ancient Enemy."

In any case, as much as I want to play with a Minoan point of view, to have some nice arguments and contrasts of perception, I haven't figured out how to defend a cultural relic of the height of their civilization finding a place amongst my cast two-hundred odd years later.




And, no, I still don't have a plot. I'm still pretty down on it being a quest novel. Of a motley collection of characters who could only have been thrust together by the most extreme of circumstances, becoming fire-forged friends and eventually accomplishing miracles.

There's two models I am currently considering. One is the "Heart of Darkness" model. The other I don't have as handy a label...perhaps call it a "Count of Monte Christo" model.

The former is a quest from a place of safety into the heart of a storm. More-or-less, the characters would launch from the court of Ramses III and journey along the path of destruction of the Sea Peoples to discover the greater evil that they in turn had fled from.

The latter is a quest to. Whereas the former begins in a place of strength, this hits nadir in a very early chapter. They've discovered a dangerous secret, and they have to fight their way across a world at war, against near-impossible odds, to deliver it to the right hands. It's the "After we get out of the inescapable prison..." plot.

Both models have their attractions. I am tempted either way to have a Ten Thousand back story for the Mycenaean. With or without his own Myrmidons. That is; they are the remnants of a mercenary army that barely escaped the fall of Ugarit, Hattusa... or even Illios. It did get sacked more than once, after all. Plus earthquakes and fire. (And to top it off, a German antiquarian with his dynamite...)

I am wary of the temptation of putting in too many historical in-jokes (or mythological in-jokes). There's a point at which this needs to be about the late Bronze Age, not about the familiar works and events and people of later ages. They should face their conflicts and solve their problems organically, not somehow through the power of being the protagonists in a novel written in the late 20th century come up with the exact same solution Scipio Africanus used against Hannibal.

Still, it is hard not to drop a mention of, say, a people largely unknown outside a peninsula of the Greek mainland who are already taking both warrior culture and a certain terse way of speaking to extremes... You know the sort of thing I mean!



So, yes. A lot of the book could be within larger social circles than our small band of adventurers. Within the fractious fighting for leadership and position within the remnant mercenary force, and the complex relationship between our main Mycenaean hero and his mentor, say. And it seems far too likely that even when they make it at last back to Pi-Ramses court intrigue ensnares them and they are forced to even more heroics to get that all-important warning to the Pharaoh, activities that drive them deep into the politics of the court and the Scribe's position there.

I don't want to go the route of larger strategic operations. I want chariots to figure at some point but our view of the battles will remain largely that of the individual foot soldier, not that of the generals. Still, modes other than the solitary heroes making only the most shallow contact with the events they move through have their attractions. Tolkien hired one of his hobbits off to Denethor, after all. He knew.

The thing I'm most sure of is the climax takes place in the Nile Delta in 1175 BCE. (Even if the real climax of the hero's arc may have taken place months earlier on an icy, lonely hill in the heart of Scythia.)

Future (theater) shock

The Control Booth forum has started emailing notifications again so I logged in to see what they were talking about.

At least two of the projects I'd been tinkering with over the years have been done by others. And done well.

The simpler is the QU-Box, which leverages a Teensy (Arduino compatible with native USB capability) and some arcade buttons to make a dedicated controller box for QLab. Honestly, though, I was an evening of soldering away from doing it for decades -- but my Korg nanokey worked so well for me I never saw the point in completing the project.

Still, kudos to Simon for making a solid, functional device and offering it in kit form for the extra budget-conscious.

The other product I spotted was the RC4 wireless dimmer system. These are quite pricey but I'd still recommend them without reservation. I have nothing against hacks but by the time you come up with a working system you will have spent almost as much, and a lot of time you usually can't afford on a theater tech schedule.

And the guy is smart. He's thought of all the things I thought of, and put most of them in the box. A lot of people would just rig a bunch of PWM outputs and call it done. He's recognized the nonlinearity of output and subsequent color rendering, and put in a much more sophisticated version of the gamut look-up table I have running on my Holocrons.

He's also added what he calls Digital Persistence (another thing I've had to do in many of my projects), which is modifying the output so instead of coming on and going off near-instantly, LEDs will behave more like incandescent bulbs. This is easy for him because he's implemented another thing I was using as a paradigm; although direct multi-channel control is the default, his devices can run a baked-in animation in stand-alone mode instead of having to receive a constant stream of instructions.




Okay, I'd still like to see my prop light thing. But skip the wireless stage -- I'm not doing that much theater anymore and it adds too much complexity. Free-running behavior, preferably set through a full-on GUI running on a host computer and uploaded via USB. Built-in LiPo management, because again, AA batteries make more sense in a theatrical context but LiPo makes more sense for cosplay and other replica prop use.

And, here's the thing. Theatrical props, especially, it makes sense from a budget and time standpoint to take something commercial (usually a toy) and throw it in there. Often it is enough that it lights up. But even something more color-critical like a storm lantern or an old radio it's easy enough for theatrical purposes to wrap some gel around it or otherwise get it "close enough."

For a replica prop, there's more of an onus on getting it to look exactly right, so flexibility and programmability are good. But here it makes sense to leverage the mostly-done-for-you end of the hacker spectrum; Arduinos, various lighting boards, neopixel strips, etc. You pay a little more but given how many hours and bucks went into the prop, that's not a real problem.

The exception I still see is when a specific prop places something at a premium. Cost (because you need dozens of duplicates), space, etc.

For instance, my Wraith Stone. What I want it to do requires a dedicated board. And I'm fine with that -- just as I'm fine with people hacking up a $4 LED charm bracelet if that's what works.

Brother, can you paradigm?

Dracula drained me.

First rehearsal at the actual space and I only went because we were going to use that time to figure out the basics of lighting and sound.

Lighting was software on a Mac. ETC "Eon Family." Which is a Mac port of a stand-alone application of the offline programming software for the Eon board. Which is at least one generation, perhaps two, past the last ETC board I was comfortable with.

So a lot of changed paradigms to deal with. First challenge; this is so much the now-accepted way of doing things, there's no introductory text to the software. There's no overview in the manual, no quick-start guide, no introductory tutorial (at least, none that aren't a three-hour training video). All the resources I was able to quickly Google up on my phone jumped right in. And as this was the latest version of a popular software offshoot of a popular board, pretty much everything I turned up was detailed lists of what had changed since the last version.

I had to figure out the underlying concepts sideways. With a fair amount of trial and error. Mac port of an offline version of a hardware board, remember? So OS GUI standards are absolutely no guide (so much so; when you invoke the "save file as..." command, it pops up a virtual keyboard you navigate with the arrow keys. No, this was not written for the computer. It was ported from hardware.

Thing is, lighting controllers -- all the lighting controllers I grew up with and used through the years -- were at the bottom of it all riffs on the paradigm of the two-scene preset. Think of it this way; for each light/control channel you had a knob. Set each knob to a different value to achieve a particular blend of lights.

Now make an exact copy of that row of knobs and add an A/B switch to switch from one set of knobs to the other. Actually, a pair of knobs, one reversed from the other; turn them one way to turn all the settings from one set of knobs all the way down and all the settings from the other set of knobs all the way up. Reverse for the opposite effect.

This was effective enough and fast enough. On the old manual boards (such as at my high school) one "scene" (one set of knob settings) would be on stage while someone quickly twisted the offline set of knobs into the next desired look. Cross-fade (as the process was called) from A to B and now A is offline and can be programmed for the upcoming look.

Boards evolved from direct physical control via rheostats to electronically controlled dimmers with the knobs -- that is, faders -- now operating on a 0-10 volt control voltage, to digital controls; at which point, all the settings could now be stored in RAM and read out with software.

But through all of this, the A/B paradigm, the so-called "Two Scene Preset," was maintained as a useful way to organize the data.

ETC began to change this back at least with the Express and Expression consoles. Since the desired position of the actual dimmers -- the big triac choppers delivering power to the actual lights -- had long since been decoupled from any direct physical control, the first big shift in paradigm is to think of a "scene" not as a collection of absolute values, but as a set of changes to whatever was the current status.

This was already a de-facto way of viewing the data, as even back in ProStar the console went out of its way to indicate which values had changed, with the values being continued from a previous cue being left in the original color.

ETC implicitly (as I read when I eventually found a more useful manual) converted to looking at all commands to the dimmer packs as being changes. Like an engine room telegraph, the dimmers (as indeed so all the new arsenal of digital fixtures, from LED pars to moving-head lights) will in the absence of new commands maintain the last directive.

Well, that's enough on that particular change. Suffice to say there are other old models which have also gone the way of the dial tone (cell phones have no need and no place for that). The only vestige still there is that the Eon series still has the default characteristic of bringing the previous commands OUT simultaneous to bringing the new commands IN.

(Another major uncoupling from the old two-scene preset paradigm is that "analog dimmers" -- aka devices that put out a varying and significant wattage that is generally poured into a variety of incandescent bulbs -- is a smaller and smaller part of what is connected to the console. Most of the light is coming from various digital fixtures, which require only digital information and which almost without exception use multiple channels of information. The analog dimmers still have a one-to-one correspondence -- or, rather, can -- but as a single LED par uses at least three control channels they are organized instead into "fixtures." The latest crop of ETC boards no longer pretend that a channel can be mapped directly to a circuit, with the rare exception of the analog dimmers, which are treated as a special case. Basically, analog dimmers are fixtures that only have one channel each.)




In any case, it wasn't the stress or the mental exercise, both of which I found invigorating. The mystery illness is back again, pretty much on schedule, and I've been barely dragging to work this week. (Work hours are still not helped by having to put in long unpaid lunches to work on my friend's project).