Two more (related) fanfic bunnies:
2013 Lara Croft looks for Atlantis instead of Yamatai. This is not the story you'd think at first glance. The 2013 reboot is somewhat more realistic but certainly more gritty than the original (or Anniversary remake) story. More so, the character and arc presented in the 2013 reboot is far from the person Natla would have hired.
So take it that one step further. The thing I've loved about the reboot Lara -- as much as the actual games largely fail to deliver -- is that she is an actual academic. She's a professionally trained archaeologist, not a treasure hunter. Plus of course she has (as she discovers in the game) remarkable depths of endurance and determination.
So change the entire Atlantis setup until it becomes something that a college student could reasonably be sucked into. Discover it not as a great adventure by a skilled adventuress, but as a completely unexpected and world-changing discovery made during an ordinary excavation.
2013 Croft (yes, that's the theme of this pair of bunnies. Sorry.) discovers the Stargate. Sorta. You have to change the Stargate universe significantly, not just to make it a story the, again, college student just starting out and unsure of her strengths Lara would fall into, but because having the whole Stargate Command thing already happening is to me not as interesting a story. So it's a rewrite there, too. The Stargate is still buried in Giza.
Or is in a warehouse outside of DC, because once you've changed one canon that far, why not change the other...that Lara's dad played the Ernest Littlefield role, the circumstances of his disappearance were covered up by the government, and, yeah, Ra is still out there.
Sigh. That's one of the downsides of learning to write. You start seeing story elements as little gears and pulleys you can re-arrange. And some pieces are like that block in the Tetris world; just so easy to fit into anything you want to keep reaching for it -- even as everyone else has already done the same. That's how well-used furniture and worn-out tropes and stock characters keep coming back and back. It is too easy to think in mechanics, not in the complexities of life. Too easy to go "Say, why don't I just add a spoiled princess here; she could tell them about the magic sword then...."
Associated with that is the urge to tinker. To take a work that someone else has produced and try to fix it. Or just shake it up and see what happens differently. What if Paris had taken Athena's bribe instead? (I bet it still would have worked out badly for Troy). What if the Ten Thousand hadn't stood down when they got word that Cyrus was dead (still probably in a world of hurt after the heirs of Artaxerxes got their shit together.
From such exercises comes alternate histories, sequels...and fanfic.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Invasion of the Cloak Pins
I almost wrote myself into a corner. After a week of despair I was finally able to back off from the impossible task of three full-length books each delving deeply into a different culture of the Late Bronze Age.
The back stories of the characters are going to have to remain largely back-story. But there are some good ideas left from that too-ambitious scheme.
I'm going to start in Akhetaton, with an official scavenging expedition into the ruins of the old city of the heretic Pharaoh. Opening that is with a distant lens on the Egyptian culture and with distant drums (the Amarna Letters have some very interesting mentions of a few of the so-called "Sea Peoples.")
I'll add on characters with small introductory/back story scenes for each until we have the full cast. And my thought was that instead of starting with Wilusa, as the first of the dominos to fall, this particular version of the Trojan War is the climax -- with our cast press-ganged along by the warlords who moved into the power vacuum in Greece following the burning of the palaces, as part of the "Sea Peoples" sweep of invasions.
And it turns out that isn't particularly out of the mainstream of archaeological thinking. The nature and extent of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are as much debated as the possible causes. We may some day look back at the idea of the Sea Peoples (who were never grouped and named as such in period sources) as as much of a relic as the idea of the Dorian Invasions.
That there were raids from the sea is not in question. Nor that there were mass migrations of people. What is in question is who any of them were; for every strong identification we manage to make on one line of evidence, there is counter-evidence. The LBA Collapse is, as has been noted, frequently interpreted to the tenor of the times. In the 1970s it was all about environmental collapse. Now the hot idea is climate change. In the pre-war years it was invasion by outsiders, some claiming the Sea Peoples swept down through Italy or even from as far as the Carpathian Mountains.
In the Cold War years invasion was closer to home; waves of raiders from Greece or from Anatolia, as if entire nations had suddenly decided to go a-Viking.
The thinking these days seems to be something like a perfect storm; earthquake, drought, famine, the complacence of too long between wars, leading to a generalized eruption of violence, piracy, mass migration, cascading displacement, and revolution against the stagnant palace economies. But there is no consensus. There is so little consensus, you can't even call the more outré theories outliers.
Like the Luwian hypothesis. This takes many forms, with the most extreme (and though-provoking) being that Troy and a big chunk of the Western coast is one powerful state, the Luwians, who drive out and all but destroy the neighboring Hittite Empire. Until a coalition of the powerful kings of the various Mycenaean Greeks form to take the battle to them.
Which would be what Homer wrote of. But I think the Luwians are selling themselves short. A powerful evil empire ruling most of the world until proud Athens stands up against them? I think we're talking Plato.
Ah, that's the fun of writing in this period. Of course, any day now could see the uncovering of something that will clarify the whole picture. Or, more likely, cause us to throw away what little we think we're sure of. And I have no guesses as to what is going to be discovered, but if you ask me where, the place that would surprise me least is the ongoing archaeological investigations at Byblos.
Monday, January 22, 2018
Don't know much about...
I am totally the wrong person to attempt a historical novel. Not because I'm so weak at history. Because I'm so crazy about getting things right. Even when "getting it right" wasn't in the requirements in the first place.
My (almost-finished) Tomb Raider/Stargate cross-over had some big escape clauses. First, it's Tomb Raider (actually, Stargate is even worse.) Canonically, Atlantis was a real place. Writing a Tomb Raider story that is honest to the existing canon is by definition writing wrong history. (It's subtler than that; especially with Stargate's implicit aliens-built-the-pyramids foundation, all of history and the process of history have to be warped to work within the framework of that universe).
Second, it was a fanfic. At any point I could declare that getting something right was just too much work. And if I made an error, I wasn't going back to fix it.
This novel is looking to be mainstream historical fiction. That's bad.
My (almost-finished) Tomb Raider/Stargate cross-over had some big escape clauses. First, it's Tomb Raider (actually, Stargate is even worse.) Canonically, Atlantis was a real place. Writing a Tomb Raider story that is honest to the existing canon is by definition writing wrong history. (It's subtler than that; especially with Stargate's implicit aliens-built-the-pyramids foundation, all of history and the process of history have to be warped to work within the framework of that universe).
Second, it was a fanfic. At any point I could declare that getting something right was just too much work. And if I made an error, I wasn't going back to fix it.
This novel is looking to be mainstream historical fiction. That's bad.
Sunday, January 21, 2018
Cold
Been reading a little fiction lately. The level of look and feel I like in a book seems rare. A military SF story didn't have it. A YA fantasy did.
I also played a little Skyrim, with several popular fan-made mods that make the cold and rain (and hunger and disease) a bigger threat than the wolves. And that reminded me that for some details of traveling, working, camping out in the wilds, I don't have to draw from secondary sources. I'm in no risk there of copying what another writer said about how it feels to labor in the cold rain to build a shelter, or to stare into the night waiting on an attack so long, and on so little sleep, the hallucinations begin. I can draw from experience.
There's got to be some advantage to having a few decades of life experience behind me. And it hasn't all been sitting at a computer. (I still wish I had a deeper grasp of the Classics, but even history -- at least at the depth I'm currently grappling with it -- is relatively new to me).
There was -- perhaps still is -- a chance to take a mere gloss of the Bronze Age and write (relatively) generic adventure on top of it. But research has a way of taking over. I just picked up a book on the history of weaving, and have an eye on an excellent book on women's experience in the Bronze Age that, unfortunately for me, comes in at a staggering $170 for hardcopy.
It is basically a fluke of Linear B; how words are constructed in it and how it was employed in the palatial societies, but one of the tiny windows into the lives of ordinary people in the Bronze Age looks upon the lives of women weavers attached to the palace.
And, yes, a similar window, a similar fluke of documentation looks into the community of artisans working in the Valley of Kings. (There's also an unusual bit of paperwork addressing the duties at a Hittite frontier guard post). And, yes, other people have pursued enquiries through these windows, which is why there's some pretty good resources on Mycenae weavers.
All of which is a long way of saying I am increasingly attracted towards writing more towards the mainstream of historical fiction. About people's lives, about their worlds. Less about military exploits with minimal context.
With these kinds of resources -- and with the situation of the Late Bronze Age -- I could elaborate the story of any single character into a novel's width. Their backstories are, currently, more interesting to me than the team-up, and I want to tell them. Even if I end up with three books before the Avengers Assemble.
At the moment, though, one of the few other elements that is coming to clarity is how I want to use magic. To borrow a term from the paper-and-pencil RPG Runequest, no "battle magic." All the cultures I've studied so far have magic that is trivially easy to use -- amulets, cantrips, potions, sacrifices -- but their effects are trivial. Or, at least, subtle. The big stuff, the live-changing prophesies or the resurrection spells or the typhoons and earthquakes take a while to set up. And often as not involve the gods.
There's little cultural equivalent of someone casually flying or throwing a bolt of fire or any of the other easily-accessed, extremely-effective magic of anyone from a Dungeons & Dragons magic-user to the Wicked Witch of the West.
I'm not ruling out the big magic, note. Although I really, really don't want to involve gods.
I also played a little Skyrim, with several popular fan-made mods that make the cold and rain (and hunger and disease) a bigger threat than the wolves. And that reminded me that for some details of traveling, working, camping out in the wilds, I don't have to draw from secondary sources. I'm in no risk there of copying what another writer said about how it feels to labor in the cold rain to build a shelter, or to stare into the night waiting on an attack so long, and on so little sleep, the hallucinations begin. I can draw from experience.
There's got to be some advantage to having a few decades of life experience behind me. And it hasn't all been sitting at a computer. (I still wish I had a deeper grasp of the Classics, but even history -- at least at the depth I'm currently grappling with it -- is relatively new to me).
There was -- perhaps still is -- a chance to take a mere gloss of the Bronze Age and write (relatively) generic adventure on top of it. But research has a way of taking over. I just picked up a book on the history of weaving, and have an eye on an excellent book on women's experience in the Bronze Age that, unfortunately for me, comes in at a staggering $170 for hardcopy.
It is basically a fluke of Linear B; how words are constructed in it and how it was employed in the palatial societies, but one of the tiny windows into the lives of ordinary people in the Bronze Age looks upon the lives of women weavers attached to the palace.
And, yes, a similar window, a similar fluke of documentation looks into the community of artisans working in the Valley of Kings. (There's also an unusual bit of paperwork addressing the duties at a Hittite frontier guard post). And, yes, other people have pursued enquiries through these windows, which is why there's some pretty good resources on Mycenae weavers.
All of which is a long way of saying I am increasingly attracted towards writing more towards the mainstream of historical fiction. About people's lives, about their worlds. Less about military exploits with minimal context.
With these kinds of resources -- and with the situation of the Late Bronze Age -- I could elaborate the story of any single character into a novel's width. Their backstories are, currently, more interesting to me than the team-up, and I want to tell them. Even if I end up with three books before the Avengers Assemble.
At the moment, though, one of the few other elements that is coming to clarity is how I want to use magic. To borrow a term from the paper-and-pencil RPG Runequest, no "battle magic." All the cultures I've studied so far have magic that is trivially easy to use -- amulets, cantrips, potions, sacrifices -- but their effects are trivial. Or, at least, subtle. The big stuff, the live-changing prophesies or the resurrection spells or the typhoons and earthquakes take a while to set up. And often as not involve the gods.
There's little cultural equivalent of someone casually flying or throwing a bolt of fire or any of the other easily-accessed, extremely-effective magic of anyone from a Dungeons & Dragons magic-user to the Wicked Witch of the West.
I'm not ruling out the big magic, note. Although I really, really don't want to involve gods.
Saturday, January 20, 2018
I am your density
Two things that surprised me about the Khajiit piece was how well the instruments worked together, and how few parts I actually needed. The first shouldn't be that great a surprise. Musical instruments have been under evolutionary pressure for centuries to get along with each other. They represent a very narrow band of all possible sounds, being sounds that are generally harmonious, of a compressed dynamic range, and generally close to the tonal range of the human voice.
The small number of parts should also not have been surprising. I had a pretty big clue from my experience with Agamemnon. When I had composed for virtual instruments (aka "MIDI") it required a fair number of parts -- of instrumental lines -- to fill up the sonic space. I wrote more sparingly for Agamemnon; what filled up the sonic space there was the stacks of noise and distortion effects.
Which physical instruments have. I forget the writer who, speaking of the difference between synthesized and "real" instruments, used the phrase "sweat and spit." The sound of a physical instrument is nuanced and ever-changing; even as not all those nuances are intentional by the performer. You hear noise. The bow squeaks, the fingers slide along strings and slap down frets and clatter on valves.
Even the massed forces of the symphony orchestra show their humanity in bits of what the creators of Garritan Personal Orchestra (a lovely collection of virtual symphonic instruments) refer to as "scoring noise." Chair move, papers rustle, people breathe. All of this added complexity adds to the interest and sonic density of the instrumental line (as well as adding to the humanity; of that special thrill of witnessing a human carrying off a difficult task.)
I grew up around keyboards. Now, I'm not going to claim all pianos sound alike, all keys sound alike, all ways of striking them sound alike. But the big thing is that piano keys are largely uncoupled from the physical actions that produce the sound. The individual notes are more alike than not. So the keyboardist works for harmonic and rhythmic complexity, for polyphonic lines, for cascades and glissandos and arpeggios; in short, for multiplicity.
A monophonic instrument like violin or trumpet (ignore double stops and multiphonics for this point) puts all the performer's nuance into a -- for lack of a better word -- vocal approach to the single melodic line. The variety of attacks, the evolutions of tone color, the options to slur or detaché or slide, are all applied to articulate the part in a way not dissimilar to how a singer forms words.
I knew all this in theory but it surprised me that it was sonically satisfying with just a recorder and a bodhran in the space. Some of this is range; the bodhran appears more limited than a rock drum kit but it still fills out many of the same frequency bands. You've got your bass hits, your tom fills, and scratching and brushing not unlike the brush and/or sizzle of a snare. Where it really lacks is in the high tones that in a kit are filled with the white-noise wash of cymbals and hat. But a recorder fits that niche nicely.
Two recorders -- soprano and alto -- fill up not just the higher tones but the vocal range. Add the wash of reverb coming back in glistening highs and a little friendly low-end mud to glue things together, and it is enough.
And that's something I really want to think about more. About how the proper selection of a relatively small number of instruments can fill up the sonic plate as effectively as the massed forces of a (synthesized) symphony orchestra.
So what next?
Obviously I need to work on my chops. Since I've gone 180' from the idea of hiding my performance deficiencies behind layers of synthesized symphonic cover to actually planning multiple exposed solo lines, I really need to become a better player than I am.
At this stage, though, performance is the best tutor. I learned so much trying to play to metronome, playing along with previously recorded tracks. And so much about where I could cover and fake and where I needed to be able to do better.
A few random ideas have appeared. The "Bardic Cover" is amusing and I know how to work those particular instruments. Not saying I'm not wishing for a tenor recorder and a guitar-like instrument with deeper tones available than the ukulele offers. (Perhaps even a baroque-lele -- they look really cool, but reviews are mixed).
It occurred to me that "NYC," of all things -- the pean to New York from the musical Annie -- might fit that instrumentation. At least it would an excuse to really try for the recorder polyphony I bowed out of on the last piece. Even filk up the lyrics..."Sol-i-tude...there's something about you..."
I'll hold on to that thought and see if the video I posted on YouTube gets any hits.
A while back the thought occurred to try to cover the original series Battlestar Galactica theme in the style of Chuck Mangione. Don't ask me why.
I found sheet music recently for the lyrical "Fire Treasure" from the long-running Lupin series of manga, anime, and movies. I bet a flugelhorn could handle the melodic line. I'd be a little surprised if my hundred-dollar trumpet could.
And close to the top of my chart at the moment, a salsa take on "Still Alive" from the game Portal. Which is trumpet, bass, keyboard, and the only part I'm sure I have the performance chops for is clave. But if I could carry it off...well, there's real temptation for another video...
The small number of parts should also not have been surprising. I had a pretty big clue from my experience with Agamemnon. When I had composed for virtual instruments (aka "MIDI") it required a fair number of parts -- of instrumental lines -- to fill up the sonic space. I wrote more sparingly for Agamemnon; what filled up the sonic space there was the stacks of noise and distortion effects.
Which physical instruments have. I forget the writer who, speaking of the difference between synthesized and "real" instruments, used the phrase "sweat and spit." The sound of a physical instrument is nuanced and ever-changing; even as not all those nuances are intentional by the performer. You hear noise. The bow squeaks, the fingers slide along strings and slap down frets and clatter on valves.
Even the massed forces of the symphony orchestra show their humanity in bits of what the creators of Garritan Personal Orchestra (a lovely collection of virtual symphonic instruments) refer to as "scoring noise." Chair move, papers rustle, people breathe. All of this added complexity adds to the interest and sonic density of the instrumental line (as well as adding to the humanity; of that special thrill of witnessing a human carrying off a difficult task.)
I grew up around keyboards. Now, I'm not going to claim all pianos sound alike, all keys sound alike, all ways of striking them sound alike. But the big thing is that piano keys are largely uncoupled from the physical actions that produce the sound. The individual notes are more alike than not. So the keyboardist works for harmonic and rhythmic complexity, for polyphonic lines, for cascades and glissandos and arpeggios; in short, for multiplicity.
A monophonic instrument like violin or trumpet (ignore double stops and multiphonics for this point) puts all the performer's nuance into a -- for lack of a better word -- vocal approach to the single melodic line. The variety of attacks, the evolutions of tone color, the options to slur or detaché or slide, are all applied to articulate the part in a way not dissimilar to how a singer forms words.
I knew all this in theory but it surprised me that it was sonically satisfying with just a recorder and a bodhran in the space. Some of this is range; the bodhran appears more limited than a rock drum kit but it still fills out many of the same frequency bands. You've got your bass hits, your tom fills, and scratching and brushing not unlike the brush and/or sizzle of a snare. Where it really lacks is in the high tones that in a kit are filled with the white-noise wash of cymbals and hat. But a recorder fits that niche nicely.
Two recorders -- soprano and alto -- fill up not just the higher tones but the vocal range. Add the wash of reverb coming back in glistening highs and a little friendly low-end mud to glue things together, and it is enough.
And that's something I really want to think about more. About how the proper selection of a relatively small number of instruments can fill up the sonic plate as effectively as the massed forces of a (synthesized) symphony orchestra.
So what next?
Obviously I need to work on my chops. Since I've gone 180' from the idea of hiding my performance deficiencies behind layers of synthesized symphonic cover to actually planning multiple exposed solo lines, I really need to become a better player than I am.
At this stage, though, performance is the best tutor. I learned so much trying to play to metronome, playing along with previously recorded tracks. And so much about where I could cover and fake and where I needed to be able to do better.
A few random ideas have appeared. The "Bardic Cover" is amusing and I know how to work those particular instruments. Not saying I'm not wishing for a tenor recorder and a guitar-like instrument with deeper tones available than the ukulele offers. (Perhaps even a baroque-lele -- they look really cool, but reviews are mixed).
It occurred to me that "NYC," of all things -- the pean to New York from the musical Annie -- might fit that instrumentation. At least it would an excuse to really try for the recorder polyphony I bowed out of on the last piece. Even filk up the lyrics..."Sol-i-tude...there's something about you..."
I'll hold on to that thought and see if the video I posted on YouTube gets any hits.
A while back the thought occurred to try to cover the original series Battlestar Galactica theme in the style of Chuck Mangione. Don't ask me why.
I found sheet music recently for the lyrical "Fire Treasure" from the long-running Lupin series of manga, anime, and movies. I bet a flugelhorn could handle the melodic line. I'd be a little surprised if my hundred-dollar trumpet could.
And close to the top of my chart at the moment, a salsa take on "Still Alive" from the game Portal. Which is trumpet, bass, keyboard, and the only part I'm sure I have the performance chops for is clave. But if I could carry it off...well, there's real temptation for another video...
Thursday, January 18, 2018
Color Grading
It's not that odd that I've never done a serious video before.
Sure...I've flirted with it. There was for instance an animation I did in Bryce 3D a while back. Hand-painted lightning effects and all. But a slow computer and a seriously small budget made serious video work too frustrating to face.
Now the thing I'm shortest of is time. It's sad, really. I have so many of the skills: I've studied basic shot and structure (whilst trying to learn comic book art...another long story). Did lighting design (for theater) professionally. Recorded voice talent including using a boom pole to do it. Built and rigged 3d models. But I don't have the patience to get into something too terribly elaborate.
I just wanted to finish the joke. As long as I was going to record a "bardic" (Early Instrument) cover of a Skyrim fan song about the memetic Khajiit fondness for shadows, I wanted to do a video that included screen capture of in-game performance of the instruments I was more-or-less simulating in the music I recorded.
And, okay: here's the final product:
After the first attempt, I decided I needed more clarity and more of an arc. The big trick in pulling things together more was to use Breezehome (an in-game purchasable dwelling in Skyrim) as the background to all the live tracks. The other was to use some long in-game sequences in full screen under the other elements, roughly dividing the video into four phases (Riften fly-in and reveal, Breezehome, the road to Riverwood, and outside the shrine in Whiterun).
I walked around Breezehome for a while, freezing in place to take 10-20 seconds of background plate wherever I found an interesting shot. Of course, it was late in the process when I realized many of my recording sessions were seated and a crouched posture would be a better perspective.
Then to live shooting. I didn't have the patience to set up lights or to really play with costumes (I also don't own any...if I do another bardic cover I should really pick up a shirt, though.) Pretty much, I popped open the 5' x 7' chroma-key screen, leaned it against the book-case, lined myself up more-or-less in front of it in my work clothes and faked my way through the parts.
I'd also done a lot of takes and a lot of chopping and adjusting when I recorded, so i would have been too much work to replicate the actual performances for the video. I mimed most of the woodwind parts when taping video. I did use a metronome to try to be somewhat on time, but when I got into the editor the lag was so bad it was too frustrating to try to line up the takes exactly.
That, and there were often artistic reasons to move the take. I slowed a few of them down, duplicated several, even mirror-imaged a couple all to fit the video better.
To take the load on the poor video editor down a little I made a comp of all the live parts and my game-recorded backgrounds. Each track had a good dozen filters on it; besides the chroma-key I had to scale and shift the background elements appropriately, brighten them up a little, and do a bunch of color and contrast adjustment to the live video to try to make it look like it belonged in the same world as the new background.
Then splice those parts into the video. With unfortunately even more tweaking of crop and scale and brightness and so forth. I didn't try to get all the instruments in there -- there are places where I tracked two shawms, four crumhorns, two recorders, ukulele, and bodhran all at the same time -- but I still ended up with almost twenty tracks of video. No wonder poor ShotCut was running slow!
Oh, yes. And the ending of the video is entirely lucky chance. I had switched to animation camera using a console code and that makes the character nearly uncontrollable. My random attempts to walk to a new shot location caused Yakima the camera cat to hide behind Heimskar the Priest. I thought it was funny so I saved it.
Sure...I've flirted with it. There was for instance an animation I did in Bryce 3D a while back. Hand-painted lightning effects and all. But a slow computer and a seriously small budget made serious video work too frustrating to face.
Now the thing I'm shortest of is time. It's sad, really. I have so many of the skills: I've studied basic shot and structure (whilst trying to learn comic book art...another long story). Did lighting design (for theater) professionally. Recorded voice talent including using a boom pole to do it. Built and rigged 3d models. But I don't have the patience to get into something too terribly elaborate.
I just wanted to finish the joke. As long as I was going to record a "bardic" (Early Instrument) cover of a Skyrim fan song about the memetic Khajiit fondness for shadows, I wanted to do a video that included screen capture of in-game performance of the instruments I was more-or-less simulating in the music I recorded.
And, okay: here's the final product:
After the first attempt, I decided I needed more clarity and more of an arc. The big trick in pulling things together more was to use Breezehome (an in-game purchasable dwelling in Skyrim) as the background to all the live tracks. The other was to use some long in-game sequences in full screen under the other elements, roughly dividing the video into four phases (Riften fly-in and reveal, Breezehome, the road to Riverwood, and outside the shrine in Whiterun).
I walked around Breezehome for a while, freezing in place to take 10-20 seconds of background plate wherever I found an interesting shot. Of course, it was late in the process when I realized many of my recording sessions were seated and a crouched posture would be a better perspective.
Then to live shooting. I didn't have the patience to set up lights or to really play with costumes (I also don't own any...if I do another bardic cover I should really pick up a shirt, though.) Pretty much, I popped open the 5' x 7' chroma-key screen, leaned it against the book-case, lined myself up more-or-less in front of it in my work clothes and faked my way through the parts.
I'd also done a lot of takes and a lot of chopping and adjusting when I recorded, so i would have been too much work to replicate the actual performances for the video. I mimed most of the woodwind parts when taping video. I did use a metronome to try to be somewhat on time, but when I got into the editor the lag was so bad it was too frustrating to try to line up the takes exactly.
That, and there were often artistic reasons to move the take. I slowed a few of them down, duplicated several, even mirror-imaged a couple all to fit the video better.
To take the load on the poor video editor down a little I made a comp of all the live parts and my game-recorded backgrounds. Each track had a good dozen filters on it; besides the chroma-key I had to scale and shift the background elements appropriately, brighten them up a little, and do a bunch of color and contrast adjustment to the live video to try to make it look like it belonged in the same world as the new background.
Then splice those parts into the video. With unfortunately even more tweaking of crop and scale and brightness and so forth. I didn't try to get all the instruments in there -- there are places where I tracked two shawms, four crumhorns, two recorders, ukulele, and bodhran all at the same time -- but I still ended up with almost twenty tracks of video. No wonder poor ShotCut was running slow!
Oh, yes. And the ending of the video is entirely lucky chance. I had switched to animation camera using a console code and that makes the character nearly uncontrollable. My random attempts to walk to a new shot location caused Yakima the camera cat to hide behind Heimskar the Priest. I thought it was funny so I saved it.
Instrumentality
Way back when I was writing music using MIDI: what we call now "virtual instruments" or "software synthesis," but at the time was largely in physical devices, often rack-mount ROMplers (a samPLER using Read-Only Memory chips to store the waveform data).
And my thought was that I should really learn to play a few of the instruments I was simulating: so as to get an understanding of the language of that instrument, how it was normally played, what is idiomatic and what is difficult, and thus produce more realistic MIDI compositions.
Some years later I was mixing bands and pit orchestras and that thought came around again in slightly different clothes: I should learn to play an instrument (other than keyboard) so I could understand and gain sympathy for what the musicians I was working with are going through, and learn how to better support them.
Forward several more years, and what changed is that I now had funds. A steady day job -- which also meant my free time was presenting in a form that made possible daily practice sessions with the instruments I could now afford. I wasn't mixing shows any more, and my own (MIDI-ish) music had moved in different directions, so what was left was mostly that largely inchoate desire to actually try a brass instrument, or even a violin, and find out if I could actually play it.
In the back of my mind was a new thought; that I could continue to compose with virtual instruments, but I could "pad out" the tracks with live recordings (the same way I was already using found sounds and samples and other sonic raw material.)
After about eighteen months of learning on what has turned into a growing collection of musical instruments I started on the first composition that would be designed from the start around recorded parts. And what happened? On closer examination that particular piece had the peculiarity that I could -- technically -- perform every part on it. There would be no MIDI, no synthesis, no found sounds. All would be actual musical performance.
The most surprising part is that it doesn't sound that bad.
(The other funny hilarious thing is that almost none of my new collection of instruments figured into it. Mostly, it became possible because back in my budget days the instruments I could afford were recorders.)
And my thought was that I should really learn to play a few of the instruments I was simulating: so as to get an understanding of the language of that instrument, how it was normally played, what is idiomatic and what is difficult, and thus produce more realistic MIDI compositions.
Some years later I was mixing bands and pit orchestras and that thought came around again in slightly different clothes: I should learn to play an instrument (other than keyboard) so I could understand and gain sympathy for what the musicians I was working with are going through, and learn how to better support them.
Forward several more years, and what changed is that I now had funds. A steady day job -- which also meant my free time was presenting in a form that made possible daily practice sessions with the instruments I could now afford. I wasn't mixing shows any more, and my own (MIDI-ish) music had moved in different directions, so what was left was mostly that largely inchoate desire to actually try a brass instrument, or even a violin, and find out if I could actually play it.
In the back of my mind was a new thought; that I could continue to compose with virtual instruments, but I could "pad out" the tracks with live recordings (the same way I was already using found sounds and samples and other sonic raw material.)
After about eighteen months of learning on what has turned into a growing collection of musical instruments I started on the first composition that would be designed from the start around recorded parts. And what happened? On closer examination that particular piece had the peculiarity that I could -- technically -- perform every part on it. There would be no MIDI, no synthesis, no found sounds. All would be actual musical performance.
The most surprising part is that it doesn't sound that bad.
(The other funny hilarious thing is that almost none of my new collection of instruments figured into it. Mostly, it became possible because back in my budget days the instruments I could afford were recorders.)
Monday, January 15, 2018
It's Not Easy Being Green
Made surprising progress today on the better version of the video:
I tried setting it up with my high-CRI fluorescent light but it actually worked better to just use room lights. And tilt my desk lamp over to get a little front light on my musical instruments.
Compositing was straight-forward in ShotCut. Also, I sent Yakima the Photographer/Bard back into Skyrim and pulled some background plates. Plus did another camera fly, this time a straight zoom into Riften. It was a little jerky -- Skyrim is running on the edge already what with the quality cranked up to High for the shoot, and enough fan-improved meshes and textures added on to bring it up past Special Edition standards, and adding the overhead of a Quicktime screen grab is almost too much for my poor computer. But...ShotCut makes it easy to re-time a clip, and at 4x the base frame rate it got nice and smooth.
The next trick is to "bake" the performance clips first, rendering them out as new video files that can then be added back in without all the overhead of multiple layers of cropping, scaling, color grading, and chromakey magic. But it looks like it is going to work.
And not take a lot more time away from the Sea People.
OpenShotCutEditor
First draft of the video for the "Khajiit" piece done. It's not working for me.
Not just for technical issues, but for a lack of focus and flow. Also...a thing that is unique about this piece is that I performed all the parts on acoustic instruments. On period acoustic instruments, in some cases. So the video should show that off and the first draft doesn't.
I was going to get a little crazy with costumes and chromakey and shadow-filled lighting because I'm shy (and because it looks like it would be fun). But seeing as I've already stuck my mug on several YouTube videos on my efforts to learn violin and trumpet, maybe I'll just set up the camera in front of the nice wooden fence we have in the backyard and film that way.
So the first quest was footage. Used QuickTime Movie Player as a screen recorder, which caused the game to slow and stutter quite a bit. I created Yakima the Location Scout-Cat and sent him out into the wilds of Skyrim for footage, armed largely with a barrel full of console codes (as I didn't have the patience to build him up to where he could actually survive the war zones we wanted to photograph).
Skyrim, as far as I am aware, doesn't really have a Mechanima plug-in, so there was a lot of ducking in and out of camera options via console. Unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to trigger a performance animation or even a walk from the "free camera" -- which really restricts the available shot angles -- and of course there's no keyframe spline to guide a tracking shot.
Then edit. iMovie is of course nearly useless. Pity the Mac never had something as nice as Windows Movie Maker. I tried out ShotCut, which generally did the job but I wanted full keyframing. Filmora keeps pushing itself everywhere that purports to be a list of "best editors" but even without the $50 price tag it just seems...underpowered.
OpenShot was well worth a try. Full keyframing, infinite layers of video tracks. The most recent versions have moved from a friendly floating tabbed window for certain functions to a tiny docked panel in which the options are less clear and a lot harder to manipulate. Still, it technically did the job...except that it borked on anything bigger than a still frame. It would hang for minutes before displaying what was right under the timeline pointer.
Natron was very interesting and worth a second look. This is the only node-based compositor in this list. One of the warning signs of open-source software is when the Linux version is highlighted. This software is deep, complex, and largely undocumented. It took a few hours to get over the hump and figure out how to patch input file through processing and merge nodes to an output render. Unfortunately, it too didn't run smoothly enough on my Mac Powerbook to allow cutting video to a music track.
So back to ShotCut. The lack of keyframes means you can't animate changes in position and scale of your clips, but it does offer fade and cross-fade. Since filters are applied per clip, not per track, you can arbitrarily slice a single clip into sub-clips and apply different filters to each; essentially keyframes without any of the inbetweening that usually smooths it out.
So how to the next version? I think I need to pen-and-paper this; to actually make something like a storyboard, if not a full script and shot list. On the flip side, I only want to spend so much time on this project. I have other, better, music waiting. And the Sea Peoples, of course.
Not just for technical issues, but for a lack of focus and flow. Also...a thing that is unique about this piece is that I performed all the parts on acoustic instruments. On period acoustic instruments, in some cases. So the video should show that off and the first draft doesn't.
I was going to get a little crazy with costumes and chromakey and shadow-filled lighting because I'm shy (and because it looks like it would be fun). But seeing as I've already stuck my mug on several YouTube videos on my efforts to learn violin and trumpet, maybe I'll just set up the camera in front of the nice wooden fence we have in the backyard and film that way.
So the first quest was footage. Used QuickTime Movie Player as a screen recorder, which caused the game to slow and stutter quite a bit. I created Yakima the Location Scout-Cat and sent him out into the wilds of Skyrim for footage, armed largely with a barrel full of console codes (as I didn't have the patience to build him up to where he could actually survive the war zones we wanted to photograph).
Skyrim, as far as I am aware, doesn't really have a Mechanima plug-in, so there was a lot of ducking in and out of camera options via console. Unfortunately there seems to be no easy way to trigger a performance animation or even a walk from the "free camera" -- which really restricts the available shot angles -- and of course there's no keyframe spline to guide a tracking shot.
Then edit. iMovie is of course nearly useless. Pity the Mac never had something as nice as Windows Movie Maker. I tried out ShotCut, which generally did the job but I wanted full keyframing. Filmora keeps pushing itself everywhere that purports to be a list of "best editors" but even without the $50 price tag it just seems...underpowered.
OpenShot was well worth a try. Full keyframing, infinite layers of video tracks. The most recent versions have moved from a friendly floating tabbed window for certain functions to a tiny docked panel in which the options are less clear and a lot harder to manipulate. Still, it technically did the job...except that it borked on anything bigger than a still frame. It would hang for minutes before displaying what was right under the timeline pointer.
Natron was very interesting and worth a second look. This is the only node-based compositor in this list. One of the warning signs of open-source software is when the Linux version is highlighted. This software is deep, complex, and largely undocumented. It took a few hours to get over the hump and figure out how to patch input file through processing and merge nodes to an output render. Unfortunately, it too didn't run smoothly enough on my Mac Powerbook to allow cutting video to a music track.
So back to ShotCut. The lack of keyframes means you can't animate changes in position and scale of your clips, but it does offer fade and cross-fade. Since filters are applied per clip, not per track, you can arbitrarily slice a single clip into sub-clips and apply different filters to each; essentially keyframes without any of the inbetweening that usually smooths it out.
So how to the next version? I think I need to pen-and-paper this; to actually make something like a storyboard, if not a full script and shot list. On the flip side, I only want to spend so much time on this project. I have other, better, music waiting. And the Sea Peoples, of course.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Ludy Morza
Drat. Outline failure.
I've been thinking a lot about the Bronze Age Collapse and how that interacts with the story I'm trying to write. I'd been aware since I'd first encountered the event of parallels with our own time. The more I read, both in history and in the news, the more I'm seeing things that I feel like I should talk about.
Heck, during the recent fires, when everyone was walking around suffering and hacking with all the smoke in the air, it struck me that the mass sacking and burning of the palatial centers of the Bronze Age would have to make things "interesting" for the poor peasantry downwind.
The evidence is fairly strong for a long period of drought at the end of the Bronze Age, possibly brought on by a small-scale climate change. There is also the possibility (as has been raised for several past cultures, particularly some mesoamerican ones, but also the dust bowl Steinbeck wrote about), that some of the problems may have been self-inflicted. There is good evidence for famine and plague as well (the latter, of course, is almost a given anyhow).
So there's a nasty echo here of the predictions of the results of modern climate change; the crop failures and famines and the loss of habitability leading to mass migrations and, when those migrations are opposed, warfare.
Plus it has certainly been mentioned before the extreme stratification of the palatial societies was itself a stressor. The interdependence of wide networks of trade has certainly been discussed; the Bronze-age equivalent of strategic minerals being of course copper and tin (and cedar) -- with the very real possibility of reaching Peak Tin. There's even been theories in some circles (looking at you, Drews) of a technological advance that changes the balance of power -- and not in the favor of the side that's been investing generations in the construction of elite Charioteers.
Be all that as it may. From the ground, the picture looks very different. I am looking at the motivations and world view of my cast and they are ill-suited to join forces to try to stop a catastrophe. For my Egyptian scholar, Egypt is eternal. Not necessarily unchanging -- very much, the people of the distant past had knowledge and technical abilities (pyramids, anyone) that the current generation can only search for.
The Mycenaean's views I'm still working on. It is possible that he sees already the ending of the heroic age that Homer will write off; the old kings, the great cities are falling, the older heroes like Perseus and Theseus have already passed on, and even the more recent heroes like Achilles were left in the dust of fallen Wilusa. He is, however, part of the new martial world of the Greek Dark Ages; he's a fighter, a noble son, a mercenary captain.
From his direct experience, though -- like that of most in the time -- there isn't so much an overwhelming pattern. They don't see the simplified sweep of invasions and collapses that we, with our paucity of records, draw on maps today. They see instead a series of discrete events. Of many alliances and changes of power and changes of ownership. They see the tumbling rock, not the avalanche.
The Minoan may have the best perspective here. (Actually, she's a Mycenaean weaver on Crete, brought up in a mountain temple and somewhere along the way picked up a romanticized proto-nationalistic understanding of the previous Minoan culture). If she knows any real history, she knows of Thera and the tsunami that may have triggered the decline and eventual destruction of the Minoan centers, paving the way for the new Mycenae thallasocracy. In short, she knows it can happen here, because she's "seen" it happen.
The Phoenician has the most potentially balanced understanding of the changes that are going on. His is also, in some ways, the most distant. He's not going to describe this is a disaster, or the movement of the various peoples lumped together by some historians as "the Sea Peoples" as an invader. He's going to see the trends of change in technology and philosophy and population density and balance of trade.
So for both these reasons, I've moved pretty far from the idea of doing some light adventure thing where my met-in-a-tavern group of unlikely heroes tour half the Mediterranean like a package tour, fighting off endless bad guys with various spectacular feats of derring-do and eventually saving the world from something even worse than a Dark Age.
But that leaves me very uncertain of where I am going to be. I had a bit of an outline that at least was an emotionally logical progression of people just trying to survive and figure out where to go next.
Even that, though, got me in trouble. I was just reading again about our favorite "heretic pharaoh," Akhenaten, and I realized there's the whole great city of Amarna, the former capital, abandoned to the sands not two hundred years ago as of the time the novel is set. What better place for my Scholar-scribe to go Indiana-Jonesing?
Go a bit north by north-east, and if my Mycenaean Xenephon actually gets his less-than-ten-thousand to the sea, he might just want to sail back to Greece and who knows what kind of fun is waiting for him back at Ithaca (or, rather, the post-palatial destruction Mycenae and other great cities).
The party is so split at this point, though, that's two different...well.....BOOKS.
I've been thinking a lot about the Bronze Age Collapse and how that interacts with the story I'm trying to write. I'd been aware since I'd first encountered the event of parallels with our own time. The more I read, both in history and in the news, the more I'm seeing things that I feel like I should talk about.
Heck, during the recent fires, when everyone was walking around suffering and hacking with all the smoke in the air, it struck me that the mass sacking and burning of the palatial centers of the Bronze Age would have to make things "interesting" for the poor peasantry downwind.
The evidence is fairly strong for a long period of drought at the end of the Bronze Age, possibly brought on by a small-scale climate change. There is also the possibility (as has been raised for several past cultures, particularly some mesoamerican ones, but also the dust bowl Steinbeck wrote about), that some of the problems may have been self-inflicted. There is good evidence for famine and plague as well (the latter, of course, is almost a given anyhow).
So there's a nasty echo here of the predictions of the results of modern climate change; the crop failures and famines and the loss of habitability leading to mass migrations and, when those migrations are opposed, warfare.
Plus it has certainly been mentioned before the extreme stratification of the palatial societies was itself a stressor. The interdependence of wide networks of trade has certainly been discussed; the Bronze-age equivalent of strategic minerals being of course copper and tin (and cedar) -- with the very real possibility of reaching Peak Tin. There's even been theories in some circles (looking at you, Drews) of a technological advance that changes the balance of power -- and not in the favor of the side that's been investing generations in the construction of elite Charioteers.
Be all that as it may. From the ground, the picture looks very different. I am looking at the motivations and world view of my cast and they are ill-suited to join forces to try to stop a catastrophe. For my Egyptian scholar, Egypt is eternal. Not necessarily unchanging -- very much, the people of the distant past had knowledge and technical abilities (pyramids, anyone) that the current generation can only search for.
The Mycenaean's views I'm still working on. It is possible that he sees already the ending of the heroic age that Homer will write off; the old kings, the great cities are falling, the older heroes like Perseus and Theseus have already passed on, and even the more recent heroes like Achilles were left in the dust of fallen Wilusa. He is, however, part of the new martial world of the Greek Dark Ages; he's a fighter, a noble son, a mercenary captain.
From his direct experience, though -- like that of most in the time -- there isn't so much an overwhelming pattern. They don't see the simplified sweep of invasions and collapses that we, with our paucity of records, draw on maps today. They see instead a series of discrete events. Of many alliances and changes of power and changes of ownership. They see the tumbling rock, not the avalanche.
The Minoan may have the best perspective here. (Actually, she's a Mycenaean weaver on Crete, brought up in a mountain temple and somewhere along the way picked up a romanticized proto-nationalistic understanding of the previous Minoan culture). If she knows any real history, she knows of Thera and the tsunami that may have triggered the decline and eventual destruction of the Minoan centers, paving the way for the new Mycenae thallasocracy. In short, she knows it can happen here, because she's "seen" it happen.
The Phoenician has the most potentially balanced understanding of the changes that are going on. His is also, in some ways, the most distant. He's not going to describe this is a disaster, or the movement of the various peoples lumped together by some historians as "the Sea Peoples" as an invader. He's going to see the trends of change in technology and philosophy and population density and balance of trade.
So for both these reasons, I've moved pretty far from the idea of doing some light adventure thing where my met-in-a-tavern group of unlikely heroes tour half the Mediterranean like a package tour, fighting off endless bad guys with various spectacular feats of derring-do and eventually saving the world from something even worse than a Dark Age.
But that leaves me very uncertain of where I am going to be. I had a bit of an outline that at least was an emotionally logical progression of people just trying to survive and figure out where to go next.
Even that, though, got me in trouble. I was just reading again about our favorite "heretic pharaoh," Akhenaten, and I realized there's the whole great city of Amarna, the former capital, abandoned to the sands not two hundred years ago as of the time the novel is set. What better place for my Scholar-scribe to go Indiana-Jonesing?
Go a bit north by north-east, and if my Mycenaean Xenephon actually gets his less-than-ten-thousand to the sea, he might just want to sail back to Greece and who knows what kind of fun is waiting for him back at Ithaca (or, rather, the post-palatial destruction Mycenae and other great cities).
The party is so split at this point, though, that's two different...well.....BOOKS.
Sunday, January 7, 2018
Crumhorns
Add penny whistle to this picture:
My cover of Miracle of Sound's "Khajiit Likes to Sneak" is done. I'm not saying it is good. I'm saying I've learned what I can from that piece and it is time to move on.
Reaper started to develop a real stutter as my track count went into the 30's and 40's. I had to dial up the buffers, and that meant latency was too bad to do real-time monitoring whilst I played in new material. I was okay with the leakage I got around the headphones, though.
I'll post the final version. Probably after I cut some sort of video for it.
On the writing front, I scribbled out some trial scenes and the outline seems to work. It gets a little vague half-way through Act II, though, so until I fill in more of it I don't even know if I am looking at one book or three.
The overall planning scheme worked. Well enough. The trick to this one -- possibly to any historical fiction -- is to control the research. Do enough general research to rough out the plot, go into rough draft as soon as possible, and generate specific research questions from that draft. After all, if no-one is going to cook, I really don't need to spend days reading about food preparation in the Hittite Empire.
The "sort of" is because I need more general research before I can finish the outline. At least it is a little more directed. I don't need to look at "everything." My topics of strongest interest are:
The Luwians and Arzawa.
Ugarit and Canaan.
Phoenicia and Bylos.
Miletus, Sparta, Athens, the Peloponnese.
In the longer-term, more towards fleshing out specific settings; Mycenaean weaving (you laugh -- but I've already found a great web page.) Sailing (perhaps even ship-building) in the Aegean. Daily life in dei el Medinah. Pi-Ramses and the Way of Horus. Cretan mountain cults.
And Homer. Writing those sample scenes showed me that I need to find a certain something for the dialog so that it doesn't feel too modern (or too contrived.) I want to read a lot of epic poetry, in translation of course (I'm not crazy), and start to get a feel for a different way of speaking.
My cover of Miracle of Sound's "Khajiit Likes to Sneak" is done. I'm not saying it is good. I'm saying I've learned what I can from that piece and it is time to move on.
Reaper started to develop a real stutter as my track count went into the 30's and 40's. I had to dial up the buffers, and that meant latency was too bad to do real-time monitoring whilst I played in new material. I was okay with the leakage I got around the headphones, though.
I'll post the final version. Probably after I cut some sort of video for it.
On the writing front, I scribbled out some trial scenes and the outline seems to work. It gets a little vague half-way through Act II, though, so until I fill in more of it I don't even know if I am looking at one book or three.
The overall planning scheme worked. Well enough. The trick to this one -- possibly to any historical fiction -- is to control the research. Do enough general research to rough out the plot, go into rough draft as soon as possible, and generate specific research questions from that draft. After all, if no-one is going to cook, I really don't need to spend days reading about food preparation in the Hittite Empire.
The "sort of" is because I need more general research before I can finish the outline. At least it is a little more directed. I don't need to look at "everything." My topics of strongest interest are:
The Luwians and Arzawa.
Ugarit and Canaan.
Phoenicia and Bylos.
Miletus, Sparta, Athens, the Peloponnese.
In the longer-term, more towards fleshing out specific settings; Mycenaean weaving (you laugh -- but I've already found a great web page.) Sailing (perhaps even ship-building) in the Aegean. Daily life in dei el Medinah. Pi-Ramses and the Way of Horus. Cretan mountain cults.
And Homer. Writing those sample scenes showed me that I need to find a certain something for the dialog so that it doesn't feel too modern (or too contrived.) I want to read a lot of epic poetry, in translation of course (I'm not crazy), and start to get a feel for a different way of speaking.
Saturday, January 6, 2018
Oh, the terrible shawm of it!
The bulk of the work is done on the "Khajiit" piece. This is a mix-down of work to date. I will be tweaking it more. (I may, for instance, remove the shawms).
There's only one variation left to do from the original song; it's a kind of repeated short chorus. I can record those parts in pretty quickly. However, I've been thinking of going off-model after that point and instead of doing 3 more rounds of the verse and chorus (as the original does) instead do an extended Bodhran break. (And had I patience and skills, a proper recorder consort with baroque polyphony...)
Hrm. I wonder if I could do a slow jazz using the crumhorn as a bass...?
There's only one variation left to do from the original song; it's a kind of repeated short chorus. I can record those parts in pretty quickly. However, I've been thinking of going off-model after that point and instead of doing 3 more rounds of the verse and chorus (as the original does) instead do an extended Bodhran break. (And had I patience and skills, a proper recorder consort with baroque polyphony...)
Hrm. I wonder if I could do a slow jazz using the crumhorn as a bass...?
...or a children's toy*
I found myself liking Rise of the Tomb Raider much more than I expected. Sure, there are problems. Many of the worst problems of the previous game of this reboot series have been fixed, at least.
One thing that you can say, though; not only is it a decent game, it is, finally, a Tomb Raider game. The puzzles are back. There's more archaeology. And the Mansion is back (in DLC only, but that's why you wait two years after release and get the GOTY version on Steam sale).
I'll write a full review eventually. At the moment, I just wanted to comment on a more nuanced understanding of archaeology that almost sneaks in through the cracks. Yes, Lara Croft is a tomb robber, no questions asked. What she does to ancient monuments, even Schliemann would be shocked into making some remark. And the games still push the artifact-centric view of the popular press (in addition to the underlying "Ancient myths are just the hiding places of ancient super-science.")
It is almost like someone in the developers is taking the piss, though, when "Loot" is the verb that pops up whether Lara is standing over either a can of rags (useful for making bandages and flaming arrows), or a sarcophagus. There, and in other small places, it seems to recognize how she's a worse role model than even Indiana Jones.
But here's the place where I really feel like an archaeological voice was in the conference room. The game still has collectable items. Like the previous entry in the series, these pop up with very nice rotatable 3D model (based on actual archaeological artifacts) while Lara talks a little about the find. Here's the interesting difference. In Tomb Raider 2013 she would identify the culture and date and often give a little note on usage. Basically she'd read the museum tag. In Rise of the Tomb Raider she is more likely to describe the object, like one would in a field journal, and make some educated guesses as to its nature. Sometimes, in fact, she is truly puzzled.
The same is generally true when she is reading inscriptions -- this is due to an underlying Language mechanic, but still, it is refreshing to see her unsure of her translations.
And there is less of a clear distinction between information that will advance the plot, and information that won't fit into the current project. Again this is meta-game; it comes from the way documents are collectable, and these documents are little snippets of text nicely voice acted for the player.
The place where this distinction is really erased is in the "Bloodlines" DLC, a mansion-based exploration in which both the plot-centric mechanical resolution and the emotional resolution are developed in parallel as two of multiple twining threads. The game goes out of its way to tell you to read all the documents, as you do not know going in which of the various threads you are following through them will lead you to the desired conclusion. This, then, is a heck of a lot closer match to field research than the "find the address to the next game level written in a prominent place right after the boss battle" structure.
The "Bloodlines" DLC also does the Language mechanic one better, in that it requires you, the player, to recognize and use several hieroglyphic characters! (The best is when you have to identify a similarity between the character for a district of ancient Egypt and the depiction of said character in a child's cardboard crown).
Spoilers, by the way!
*yes, and she does make the "children's toy" comment over one of the artifacts she uncovers. Again, I'm convinced someone over at Core actually did some reading.
One thing that you can say, though; not only is it a decent game, it is, finally, a Tomb Raider game. The puzzles are back. There's more archaeology. And the Mansion is back (in DLC only, but that's why you wait two years after release and get the GOTY version on Steam sale).
I'll write a full review eventually. At the moment, I just wanted to comment on a more nuanced understanding of archaeology that almost sneaks in through the cracks. Yes, Lara Croft is a tomb robber, no questions asked. What she does to ancient monuments, even Schliemann would be shocked into making some remark. And the games still push the artifact-centric view of the popular press (in addition to the underlying "Ancient myths are just the hiding places of ancient super-science.")
It is almost like someone in the developers is taking the piss, though, when "Loot" is the verb that pops up whether Lara is standing over either a can of rags (useful for making bandages and flaming arrows), or a sarcophagus. There, and in other small places, it seems to recognize how she's a worse role model than even Indiana Jones.
But here's the place where I really feel like an archaeological voice was in the conference room. The game still has collectable items. Like the previous entry in the series, these pop up with very nice rotatable 3D model (based on actual archaeological artifacts) while Lara talks a little about the find. Here's the interesting difference. In Tomb Raider 2013 she would identify the culture and date and often give a little note on usage. Basically she'd read the museum tag. In Rise of the Tomb Raider she is more likely to describe the object, like one would in a field journal, and make some educated guesses as to its nature. Sometimes, in fact, she is truly puzzled.
The same is generally true when she is reading inscriptions -- this is due to an underlying Language mechanic, but still, it is refreshing to see her unsure of her translations.
And there is less of a clear distinction between information that will advance the plot, and information that won't fit into the current project. Again this is meta-game; it comes from the way documents are collectable, and these documents are little snippets of text nicely voice acted for the player.
The place where this distinction is really erased is in the "Bloodlines" DLC, a mansion-based exploration in which both the plot-centric mechanical resolution and the emotional resolution are developed in parallel as two of multiple twining threads. The game goes out of its way to tell you to read all the documents, as you do not know going in which of the various threads you are following through them will lead you to the desired conclusion. This, then, is a heck of a lot closer match to field research than the "find the address to the next game level written in a prominent place right after the boss battle" structure.
The "Bloodlines" DLC also does the Language mechanic one better, in that it requires you, the player, to recognize and use several hieroglyphic characters! (The best is when you have to identify a similarity between the character for a district of ancient Egypt and the depiction of said character in a child's cardboard crown).
Spoilers, by the way!
*yes, and she does make the "children's toy" comment over one of the artifacts she uncovers. Again, I'm convinced someone over at Core actually did some reading.
Friday, January 5, 2018
Get Out of Troy Free Card
The novel is terrifying me. I'm worried about the research. I'm worried about the people I'm going to annoy.
I finally got an outline -- albeit the barest sketch of an outline -- and it is taking me right where I didn't want to go. Into the heart of New Kingdom Egypt, and into Troy*.
And Troy is deep in the shadow of Homer. So worry about what the Classics scholars will think. And the historians (mostly the amateurs -- professionals have work to do). And it being the, you know, Trojan War, there's a whole other crop of military buffs to complain if it's the wrong swords or whatever.
And same goes for Egypt (substituting amateur Egyptologists for the Classics buffs.)
*There's an odd escape clause about the latter, though. If you say, "Here we are before the walls of Troy" then the door is opened to showing equipment and methods that aren't exactly late bronze age (and not even exactly Homer's time, either). And of course you can include gods and demigods and all that rot. If you say, "...Wilusa" then you've made a contract with the reader to come a lot closer to the realities of 1200 BCE.
I have found myself having taken unwilling steps into the well-established field of contemporary historical fiction. A little (belated) research, and the the relative popularity of periods and subjects and so forth in the field is surprising. According to a recent poll (self-selected for people who make historical fiction a majority of their recreational reading), the book that would hit the most bullet points would be set in the 18th century, feature a strong female lead who nonetheless is exemplar of the thoughts and ways of her time, and who is not famous but is a witness to history. And is in a long-running series and being read by a woman in America who devours over twenty books a year.
Reading into the spaces of the data, there might be a small cadre of UK-based men who like military history set in Roman times. For the purposes of the poll I mentioned, the entire span of recorded history from Assyria up to the fall of Rome is one, relatively unpopular, period. And of course meticulous research as well as honesty to actual history is strongly expected and preferred.
A bronze age adventure doesn't exactly fall between the cracks. It would work -- but work better if it references real historical people and events. (And is part of a series!)
This isn't the novel I originally set out to write. I was thinking more towards light fantasy, basically using tropes from that and using the Bronze Age as a generalized setting. And I haven't quite ruled that out. Nor are these absolutes; there is a bit of graduation between the two extremes.
Not, however, that much. Although Homer (or for that matter Shakespeare) didn't worry overly about historical accuracy, modern readers do. Modern historical fiction readers are also (same poll) quite into social networking, and that translates into an active dialog to discuss and dissect works -- that is, a fertile field for fault-finding.
A book that is clearly fantasy, referencing the historical and the mythological in clever (and well-informed) ways, passes. But in the middle lies a lacuna; works that blend too much real history and not-history will displease everyone (well, at least displease those who are actively searching out historical fiction. And probably boring those who want fantasy adventure).
If I'd set out to write a Historical novel in the first place, it would probably be about the Takarazuka Dance Troop in the period between the hyper-nationalism of Japan and their defeat in the Pacific War. Heck, I've even got the title; "The Song of the Crane."
And if I'd set out to write fantasy with some historical elements, I've already got one that stalled on the outline (the history being largely the American Folk Music Revival of the 40's through 60's, even though the story is set either contemporary or in the early 2000's).
The novel of the Bronze Age Collapse survived outlining. Otherwise, though, it fills me with trepidation.
I finally got an outline -- albeit the barest sketch of an outline -- and it is taking me right where I didn't want to go. Into the heart of New Kingdom Egypt, and into Troy*.
And Troy is deep in the shadow of Homer. So worry about what the Classics scholars will think. And the historians (mostly the amateurs -- professionals have work to do). And it being the, you know, Trojan War, there's a whole other crop of military buffs to complain if it's the wrong swords or whatever.
And same goes for Egypt (substituting amateur Egyptologists for the Classics buffs.)
*There's an odd escape clause about the latter, though. If you say, "Here we are before the walls of Troy" then the door is opened to showing equipment and methods that aren't exactly late bronze age (and not even exactly Homer's time, either). And of course you can include gods and demigods and all that rot. If you say, "...Wilusa" then you've made a contract with the reader to come a lot closer to the realities of 1200 BCE.
I have found myself having taken unwilling steps into the well-established field of contemporary historical fiction. A little (belated) research, and the the relative popularity of periods and subjects and so forth in the field is surprising. According to a recent poll (self-selected for people who make historical fiction a majority of their recreational reading), the book that would hit the most bullet points would be set in the 18th century, feature a strong female lead who nonetheless is exemplar of the thoughts and ways of her time, and who is not famous but is a witness to history. And is in a long-running series and being read by a woman in America who devours over twenty books a year.
Reading into the spaces of the data, there might be a small cadre of UK-based men who like military history set in Roman times. For the purposes of the poll I mentioned, the entire span of recorded history from Assyria up to the fall of Rome is one, relatively unpopular, period. And of course meticulous research as well as honesty to actual history is strongly expected and preferred.
A bronze age adventure doesn't exactly fall between the cracks. It would work -- but work better if it references real historical people and events. (And is part of a series!)
This isn't the novel I originally set out to write. I was thinking more towards light fantasy, basically using tropes from that and using the Bronze Age as a generalized setting. And I haven't quite ruled that out. Nor are these absolutes; there is a bit of graduation between the two extremes.
Not, however, that much. Although Homer (or for that matter Shakespeare) didn't worry overly about historical accuracy, modern readers do. Modern historical fiction readers are also (same poll) quite into social networking, and that translates into an active dialog to discuss and dissect works -- that is, a fertile field for fault-finding.
A book that is clearly fantasy, referencing the historical and the mythological in clever (and well-informed) ways, passes. But in the middle lies a lacuna; works that blend too much real history and not-history will displease everyone (well, at least displease those who are actively searching out historical fiction. And probably boring those who want fantasy adventure).
If I'd set out to write a Historical novel in the first place, it would probably be about the Takarazuka Dance Troop in the period between the hyper-nationalism of Japan and their defeat in the Pacific War. Heck, I've even got the title; "The Song of the Crane."
And if I'd set out to write fantasy with some historical elements, I've already got one that stalled on the outline (the history being largely the American Folk Music Revival of the 40's through 60's, even though the story is set either contemporary or in the early 2000's).
The novel of the Bronze Age Collapse survived outlining. Otherwise, though, it fills me with trepidation.
Tuesday, January 2, 2018
...no escape from reality
I have the bones of an outline.
I have not, quite, put away my other options, but my little horse is really wanting to see that farmhouse now. It is high time to start writing.
Not-quite-discarded option #3 is to stick with High Fantasy structure. Three or four party members of different backgrounds and skills "meet in a bar" and set out on an epic quest. Which involves magic and gods and high stakes and is generally away from the better-known parts of Bronze Age history (aka, don't spend a lot of time in Egypt.)
The best I can say about this is the research needs are small. And it aims for a larger audience than the more mainstream historical fiction one. But I dislike it because it feels dishonest to the actual history and peoples.
Rather-more-tempting option #2 is Cypriot. Cypress is today a divided nation and archaeological evidence supports that it could have divided during parts of the late Bronze Age. Or, at least, the situation is complex; there are cities that were clearly sacked, for instance, but others that appear not to have fallen.
So Cypress could be used as a microcosm to talk about the Bronze Age Collapse. The characters could meet there and largely stay there, involved in terribly complex palace politics and warring city-states and civil war and incipient collapse and the final evolution from the Palatial culture to the period of the Greek Dark Ages.
It is exciting because it isn't one of the Big Three and hasn't been done to death. But it would be heavy-duty research -- it would be practically impossible without a visit to the modern-day island, for instance -- and equally heavy plotting.
Current-best option #1 is made possible by splitting the party. If I tell the bulk in two independent narratives it opens up the plot to borrowing heavily from existing sources -- and waving some of the more popular elements at the reader. The Egyptian Scribe half of the party cribs heavily from Tale of Setna and large parts of his Indiana-Jones style search for a lost manuscript takes place around Dier el Medineh -- up to and including a run-in with the notorious Paneb. And then he sets out from Pi-Ramses with his charioteers along the Way of Horus.
In parallel (though possibly not in parallel time) the Mycenaean Mercenary half of the party is driven from Wilusa, and after someone burns the boats, has to strike out down the coast towards Miletus (or some other friendly Greek territory). So basically the Anabasis. And our young Mycenaean learning about command and honor and otherwise sorting out his own relationship to the Heroic myth. Oh, yes -- and the Sea Peoples (or someone) is not far behind them.
The party is finally assembled to witness the fall of Ugarit. From there, a quick but far from uneventful sea voyage to the Greek heartland only to discover the ruins of Mycenae and the other great cities. And then? Either back to Pi-Ramses to witness the battle of the Nile Delta, or striking up the Italian Peninsula to vanish into myth.
Among the problems I have with this scheme is that once I am already stealing from Homer and Xenephon and Coptic Egyptian texts from as late as the Ptolemiac period, it becomes far too easy to justify stealing stuff like the First Servile War (during Roman times) with a literal fire-breathing Prophet as a leader, or for that matter the machinations of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus as part of the story of a struggling but falling city of the old order. That is, in short, the temptation and the danger -- inherent in the premise -- of merely re-telling history which would be far too familiar to some of the readership.
It would be a fine line to tread. I like the idea of Easter Eggs for the more canny reader, but the more I use these sources, as well, the more important I get the stuff right. And that, again, is a lot of research.
I have not, quite, put away my other options, but my little horse is really wanting to see that farmhouse now. It is high time to start writing.
Not-quite-discarded option #3 is to stick with High Fantasy structure. Three or four party members of different backgrounds and skills "meet in a bar" and set out on an epic quest. Which involves magic and gods and high stakes and is generally away from the better-known parts of Bronze Age history (aka, don't spend a lot of time in Egypt.)
The best I can say about this is the research needs are small. And it aims for a larger audience than the more mainstream historical fiction one. But I dislike it because it feels dishonest to the actual history and peoples.
Rather-more-tempting option #2 is Cypriot. Cypress is today a divided nation and archaeological evidence supports that it could have divided during parts of the late Bronze Age. Or, at least, the situation is complex; there are cities that were clearly sacked, for instance, but others that appear not to have fallen.
So Cypress could be used as a microcosm to talk about the Bronze Age Collapse. The characters could meet there and largely stay there, involved in terribly complex palace politics and warring city-states and civil war and incipient collapse and the final evolution from the Palatial culture to the period of the Greek Dark Ages.
It is exciting because it isn't one of the Big Three and hasn't been done to death. But it would be heavy-duty research -- it would be practically impossible without a visit to the modern-day island, for instance -- and equally heavy plotting.
Current-best option #1 is made possible by splitting the party. If I tell the bulk in two independent narratives it opens up the plot to borrowing heavily from existing sources -- and waving some of the more popular elements at the reader. The Egyptian Scribe half of the party cribs heavily from Tale of Setna and large parts of his Indiana-Jones style search for a lost manuscript takes place around Dier el Medineh -- up to and including a run-in with the notorious Paneb. And then he sets out from Pi-Ramses with his charioteers along the Way of Horus.
In parallel (though possibly not in parallel time) the Mycenaean Mercenary half of the party is driven from Wilusa, and after someone burns the boats, has to strike out down the coast towards Miletus (or some other friendly Greek territory). So basically the Anabasis. And our young Mycenaean learning about command and honor and otherwise sorting out his own relationship to the Heroic myth. Oh, yes -- and the Sea Peoples (or someone) is not far behind them.
The party is finally assembled to witness the fall of Ugarit. From there, a quick but far from uneventful sea voyage to the Greek heartland only to discover the ruins of Mycenae and the other great cities. And then? Either back to Pi-Ramses to witness the battle of the Nile Delta, or striking up the Italian Peninsula to vanish into myth.
Among the problems I have with this scheme is that once I am already stealing from Homer and Xenephon and Coptic Egyptian texts from as late as the Ptolemiac period, it becomes far too easy to justify stealing stuff like the First Servile War (during Roman times) with a literal fire-breathing Prophet as a leader, or for that matter the machinations of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus as part of the story of a struggling but falling city of the old order. That is, in short, the temptation and the danger -- inherent in the premise -- of merely re-telling history which would be far too familiar to some of the readership.
It would be a fine line to tread. I like the idea of Easter Eggs for the more canny reader, but the more I use these sources, as well, the more important I get the stuff right. And that, again, is a lot of research.
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