Plot Twist

So I went to TechShop -- sorry, "TheShop." (Idiots). And despite the calendar showing it was open, and even the tool reservation calendar showing tool reservations being made....it was actually closed. No, there wasn't any notice. Closest they came was a question asked by a member on the private Facebook group that was answered by another member.

Yeah, great communications. Why am I paying membership to these idiots?

Wasn't a total waste. I went over to MOMA and looked at art (I get in free all year -- more benefits of the full-time job).

Was kind of tired after closing night anyhow. Had a light go out. I have five front lights so I really, really needed it. Corroded socket of course, so all I could do is scratch out the worst of it with a nail file. On closing night the instrument dropped out right at the top of the show...fortunately it hangs right in front of the light booth so I was able to tap it back to life with a broomstick and then I spent the whole show carefully never turning it all the way off (because it would never turn back on).

So I still don't have anything I need at TheShop. But I'm eager to get checked off on the machines I've used in the past so when a future need comes I can go in and start bending metal. (Well, not bending metal...I didn't do the Safety and Basic Use classes on the brake and sheer yet).

What I have for the moment is random fun-to-do projects. Chief among which is making a mini loom. Honestly, for what I want in a loom I can tinker up something at my workplace. The only reason to do a laser-cut version is to, yes, get my permission in order for future lasering.

Could also cut some guitar picks, again just for the fun of it. Weaving tools gives me a few other excuses to unlock tools; 3d print a spindle whorl. Or even lathe one up on the wood lathe. Or could even CNC a spindle whorl out of aluminium but...

Oh, right. Haven't ordered the churro yet (did order some deerskin scraps and rawhide to make a tool roll for my traditional flint-knapping kit). Found a 1oz pack of wool roving in the embroidery supplies at my favorite local fabric store but my first attempt at hand spinning did not go swimmingly. Mocked up a quick drop-spindle from a bamboo chopstick and some red clay. Did eventually get a short two-ply that doesn't look horrible, but I went back another 2,000 years down the tech tree to create that one; I rolled it on my thigh.

Yeah, looms. Sure, I might make a ukulele strap with a tablet loom, but it is primarily for historical research. Even if I don't even know if my Cretan weaver is using a fixed heddle. Or any heddles. Certainly not tablets. Well, probably not. Remember what I said about adoption? It is a tech that is of limited use in that time and place, and I can defend that it might have arose here, been known to a few people but never documented or achieved any prominence.

As for prop projects: after I've gotten some cleaning done I'll dust off the Holocrons and see if anyone at the RPF still wants one. Unfortunately I haven't been able to think of anything that really leverages the kinds of equipment I have available at TheShop. There's always Aliens grenades, but they are a finicky machining project that takes way too long to be profitable. Or interesting.

Unfortunately top of my prop list right now seems to be re-doing the "Yamatai" necklace. This is actually a good lead-in project for the Wraith Stone as I intend to do the same sculpt-and-scan process to make a 3d file. Which I'll then have printed at Shapeways for the fine detail available there, clean up and hand-detail the print, then cast it in resin. Then make the 3d file publicly available.

References are of course poor. I'm almost tempted to play the game again to see if I can get a better screen shot. There are some visualization and promotional artworks, but they look rather different. In fact, there's almost reason to go with two necklace designs (at least in part because the artwork version has a clearer link to real existing traditions -- chiefly Maori -- and to my eye is a more pleasing design anyhow).

And actually, that might be a quick laser project too. Would make the sculpt easier if I created a flat "armature" out of some thin, stiff material like 1/16" acrylic...

Inkle Dinkle Do

I've mentioned that I rather dislike when a character in a historical novel starts going around inventing modern technology. I mean the sort of stuff that seems obvious in hindsight, like the stirrup or paper clips. I don't think it works. It doesn't really make the character seem smart and insightful, because we have paper clips. It does make the society they are in look dumber, because if it was so obvious, why didn't they have it already?

First there's context. Stirrups do you no good in an age of chariotry; you need horses and the horsemanship to fight from horseback before the extra stability is helpful. Then there's development; there were a thousand variations of paperclip (and even more, the zipper); the trick was figuring out how to manufacture it economically. Inventing a technology is nothing if you can't get it adopted.

And lastly there's a nasty little observation, and that has to do with the subsistence trap. The people who kneel over a floor loom for generation after generation don't invent the standing loom, because they don't have the spare time. They can't take a chance on something that might work when it takes every waking hour just to put food on the table. It is the same economic trap every poor person in the developed world falls into.

So, no, I don't want my Cretan weaver to invent a tablet loom.

Yeah...there's an academic paper which I'm currently trying to track down, which apparently argues convincingly that a certain embroidered belt belonging to Rameses II could not have been constructed on a tablet loom. The best evidence for them is 800 BCE Europe -- and most textile and metal technologies seem to have spread from Europe to the Aegean.

Pity, in part because this means I need to learn what the actual technology for decorative strips was. So more research.




Also pity because tablet weaving just seems like so much fun (well....for a certain level of fun; you really have to grade this one on a curve because weaving and spinning are almost defined by being monotonous and extremely time consuming.)

I'm very much going to try hand-spinning on a drop-spindle. I found a place called The Woolery which has wool top from Navaho Churro -- the most similar thing to Bronze Age sheep I've found so far, although I remember reading somewhere there is a breed that definitely comes close (the distinction is, bronze age sheep shed instead of being sheared.) And the Woolery has Dew-Retted Flax, for when you want to get really crazy.

I've also found some plans on Thingiverse for simple laser-cut looms. I am thinking of lasering at least some tablets and shuttles, and possibly design up a mini fixed-heddle loom. And perhaps 3d print or even wood lathe a spindle whorl.

Because even more than doing a little historical recreation bronze-age weaving, what I rather need to do now is get checked back in on as many tools of the reborn TechShop as I can.

The One Who Flew Away from Omelas : Project Aho

Skyrim is still going strong. The energy is not just in the new Elder Scrolls Online. Some people, apparently, still want to life their alternate lives in solitary splendor.

And put an amazing amount of work into improving the experience for everyone.

Project Aho is a massive new adventure in the Skyrim universe, released as a free mod on March 22 of this year. There is much good to say about it and I intend to do so here, but that is not the main purpose of this mini-review. That purpose is to address an elephant that was in the room, and the way in which this elephant seems to be selectively visible.

First, the mechanical stuff. It plays smoothly and looks professional. That is a lot more work to achieve than you might think. It isn't enough to have nice-looking scenery; you also have to play-test the heck out of the stuff so players and AI's don't get trapped in intersections of the geometry or end up clipping out of the world entirely. Big budget AAA games have shipped with these kinds of bugs. I didn't encounter a single one in playing Project Aho.

The assets are not just well crafted, but artistically inspired. The characters are alive and interesting, the voice acting almost without flaw, the settings intriguing and unique as well as spectacular. The music is also outstanding, and it all works to support the core conceit; of this hidden community with its own bizarre ecosystem and rituals.

This is the greatest strength in play as well, but it goes hand in hand with the greatest weakness. Your existing Skyrim character is ripped out of their usual surroundings and deposited -- trapped -- in this new and confusing land and has to explore and interact and try to make sense of it all. The first third of the game is slow and almost meditative as you slowly learn your way around this strange place and begin to adjust to its ways and rhythms.

Here is the weakness; the way the writers chose to place you here is to kidnap and enslave your character. Which is manipulative, rail-roading, in a way that goes against the basic play style of Skyrim. Skyrim is an open-world game, where you can take off in any direction at any moment, explore freely whatever you can reach. And a game in which you always have choice.

It is built into the basic philosophy, a philosophy shared by the hardy Nords who call this region of Tamriel home; it is all about choice. About the freedom to make your own moral and ethical way, and accept the consequences of your own actions.

In any quest in Skyrim you may find yourself being asked to do random fetch quests, to trudge through tundra or tunnels in search of some random item just because someone else wants it and has asked you to get it for them. Making your character a slave, and the only path to freedom to complete these tasks, changes the perception of this process. You can't walk away, other than by closing the game.




Yes, this is only perceptual. This is a strange world, you don't even understand how it works much less how to escape. So you start doing favors for random strangers. That's how RPGs have worked, from well before KOTOR. It is just a little...odd...that you are doing this despite being, you know, a slave. It becomes more and more off-putting as people interact with you as if you are the ordinary wandering Joe adventurer. Instead of someone who was kidnapped here, is being actively threatened with torture and murder by their master, and is trying desperately to escape. "Could you help me find my wife's wedding ring? I think it fell in a haystack" takes on an entirely different flavor than the one the writers presumably intended.

The last two thirds of the game are epic dungeon crawls with tons of combat. This is a Nintendo Hard mod, with the leveled monsters being much, much tougher than their main game equivalents (let me put it this way; my mage was getting killed by mid-level enemies inside Project Aho, but after she escaped she polished off a leveled Dragon without breaking a sweat).

Which makes for an odd contrast, but anyhow. The quests are amusing enough and the build decent, although the quest markers could use improvement. Another quibble I have is that there is far too much loot. Not only is it unbalancing even within Project Aho, it is grossly unbalancing to the main game. But that's not even the worse of it; the worst is there's simple so much it gets in the way. You finally have to just ignore it.

Eventually you are brought to a moral choice. Of a sorts. And here is where the elephant becomes overwhelming.




Your murderous, largely-insane master is discovered to be embarking on a mad scientific experiment that threatens the entire hidden community. You didn't, of course, get to do anything at all, anything active, anything productive towards the revelation. But for some reason the powers that be announce they'd prefer to have you working for them anyway and offer you your freedom in return for stopping him.

Actually, its a little odder than that. They say, "Sorry for kidnapping and enslaving you. Here's your stuff back. You are free to go. But if you stick around to stop the bad guy, we could see about slipping a little extra cash your way."

The thing is...the thing is...

They are still a slave-holding culture. There are slaves in the room when they are making this grand offer. Which is twenty feet from where, while you were on the auction block, they murdered another slave before your eyes. This is slavery in one of the worst ways; the slaves (with you as an odd and rather unexplained exception) are voiceless and nameless. Literally. Their tongues and their names are taken along with all ability to resist (a control collar that, in game only acts on you as an invisible wall and the annoying inability of people like Dear Master to die when you firebolt them at point-blank range.)

This is where that selective visibility comes in. Because there's no dialog option to talk about it. No place to make a different bargain. No way to work to change that society. No option, ever, to free a single one of your fellows in bondage. Apparently, you are supposed to be happy that you got all your stuff back.

And the writers may not be wrong. I took at look through comments at the Nexus and Steam and I couldn't find a single person speaking about this. It is a sobering blindness.

It is a lovely place, of course. Almost a utopia. I can understand why the writers believed that players would be happy that they were free to leave, and would then be happy to jump right in to the community, buy a house there (yes, this is very much an option), go on all the remaining little fetch quests, hang out with the people there, etc. Their own private little garden tucked into a corner of Skyrim.

Yes, players just may be that selfish. But the writers should have been better than that. Leaving this status quo was unacceptable. Letting them get away with taking more people from their homes and freedom and stripping their very voice and name from them was unacceptable.

I went back to Dear Old Master and when he said, "I'm about to throw this Big Red Switch over here because I'm mad and evil and I want to see what happens," I said, "I'll help!"

Ancient Ancient History

I've been organizing my Kindle collection and adding even more history books (there's still several I really want to read that are either only in hardback, in the $150 and up range, or both).

Amazon Kindle seems to have gotten even more cagey about revealing publication history, especially when it is a reprint title. Fortunately, it is quite clear when you start reading the sample pages of what looks like a useful reference that it is a reprint of something from 1914.

And even if it isn't...if somehow I've stumbled on a modern but isolated academic writer who still ascribes to outmoded ideas and couches them in old-fashioned terms...well, I don't really need that book, either.

As I was telling a friend last night, writing fiction in the Late Bronze Age involves a strange paradox. On the one hand, so much is still unknown and what is seemingly knowable is hotly debated; this appears to offer to the writer free reign in creativity.

On the gripping hand, though, the archaeological and textual evidence is meticulous (meticulously collected and meticulously argued in precise, savage, point-by-point academic writings).

My feeling is you must know the data, and the most current data possible, if you are going to pretend to be writing history (the escape hatch is always open to chose to write clear fantasy).




Meanwhile my current plot is a drawing of a line. I've got this line with sweeps on it that represent the build through climactic events to the finale chapter. It also has two zero crossings to reflect the sort of Act II/III shift I've talked about in the past; the places where what had been the goal becomes changed or clearly impossible, the very shape of the perceived world changes.

And the smatterings of a cast. Who are still carrying around place-holder names; there's 163, the scrawny and unprepossessing official scribe of the Weaver's Hall (named for an apparently historical individual identified only by his handwriting). And there's the firebrand revolutionary, hiding a cruel pragmatism below his populist speech, and almost as dangerous as he thinks he is, whom I've saddled with the unfortunate place-holder Dildano.

And I have to say I'm really looking forward to Setna's appearance in the last couple chapters. He's almost an out of context problem to the situation on Crete; rich beyond the imagination of most of my cast, a representative of a nation ridiculously powerful, and an outsider with cutting insight into the larger context.

Kid Zeus

I think I'm there. I've enough idea of what is plausible in the politics and economy and so forth to get into the meat of the plotting. Which I want to have some good red blood in it; love, betrayal, sacrifice. Growing up, changing, making hard choices, having goals, changing goals, having failures, having victories. All the stuff that, basically, can (should?) be there whether the story takes place on Mycenaean Crete or on the Moon.

That's the stuff to work on now.

Not to say I'm not going to continue reading about politics and economy and material culture and religion and ethnicity and language and writing and....  And reading general, overview stuff, still. Later on is when I'll need to ask specific questions about the right ritual or the right cup.

I'm tempted to reverse myself again. Finding those little specific details is hard. Especially, finding the ones that are so particular and specific they give flavor and insight to a culture. But those details will only support your narrative if you keep the camera very close to street level. At any kind of story where your involvement is deeper than looking at the pretty scenery, you need to know how things work. And getting that sense may in fact be the more difficult task.

My sources on the Mycenaeans are still wonderfully contradictory. For every way of looking at the available evidence there's a cogent and well-argued paper against it. About the best I can say is that humans are complicated and so is history. What is likely true is that no simplification is quite right. The great hill complexes are palaces and administrative centers and temples. The feasts and other ceremonies are religious and secular.

And so forth. I was looking most recently at a paper drawing inferences from excavation of an impressive house outside the original city walls (aka the Lion Gate) of Mycenae itself. First off, it is very suggestive that massive building programs with a dramatically more organized pattern starts maybe a hundred years before the collapse. Which is close enough to both the first sightings of the Sea Peoples, the possible drought, and the earthquake storm that seems to have toppled walls across the Aegean.

There's suggestive changes in artistic styles and trade goods and grave goods that may point at a dramatically more centralized turn to things. Of course the overall pattern in many (but not even the majority!) of cities over this period is building of walls and the tucking of as much of the important population behind them. Followed by abandonment of city centers and retreat from the coasts. Depending on where you look, that is!

It all fits the fin de sicle...heck, the Weimar flavor I'm thinking of. The political elite ruling with an ever more stringent hand, organizing everything in a vain attempt to stem the tides as ecological stressors and outside raiders sweep towards them.

And...I don't know if I can use it, as I've pretty much fixed on a direct palatial workplace for my protagonist, but the suggestion of independent business people who come across more as traders and skilled craftsmen than as nobility who are earning a little side money, and who may be the inheritors of a full "House" system of previous eras...

But yeah the palace. The sources can't even decide on the economic basis. Or trade. I'm seeing it argued that a gift economy is the only functional long-distance trade. Or that such trade was small. There is a nice number; the amount of bronze recorded as being given (to workshops or as rewards...the records are not always clear which) from Pylos over an entire year is under a ton. You might look at the dozen-odd tons of ox-hide copper ingots on the Uluburun shipwreck as being bulk cargo, but do not mistake; these are luxury goods. Bronze is expensive. Only the heroes -- that is, kings and the sons of kings -- in Homer could afford bronze armor.

And more weirdness. The assortment of goods on the three Bronze Age wrecks we've recovered so far is rather too wide. Uluburun might make sense as a sort of Solar Queen (of the Andre Norton stories), trading one good for another as it wanders from port to port, but the smaller wrecks are too small for this to make sense. There had to be multiple hands, places where traders met other traders. And too many of the goods aren't really luxuries.

You can argue it is all kingly gifts, gifts in kind (as documented in various letters) but there's these weird little bits here and there, like a guy who brought Alum to Knossos and despite the records saying he was paid "wages" he walked off with fine cloth and even a little bronze. Well, yeah, there are records in the Hittite Empire of what are very much individual traders and craftsmen, pledging their own resources and pocketing their own profits. It can't be just elites trading gifts for political advantage.

And then there's the penetration. Pots from Greece make it to Anatolia but rarely into Egypt. What few clearly Aegean goods do show up in Egypt are grave goods of lesser nobility. Is it just Egyptian arrogance, that only local work was good enough for the Pharaohs? And where the heck is Punt, anyhow? (For every source that says Punt is now firmly located, another demurs). But are we looking in the wrong places if we just concentrate on luxury goods? I guess we have to, since tomb goods are what we can see now. If there was barley coming from Ugarit it got eaten long ago. We certainly know that cedar came in great abundance up the Nile....because you don't build massive boats with just reeds.

The seemingly sensible economic model is that the palace collected grain as tithe and used that as wages to pay skilled workers who created trade goods which could bring in luxuries (and political advantage) for the elite. But there are as many arguments against this scheme as there are supporting documents for it.

I've definitely rethought how I think of Mycenaean society. The Homeric model is a dark ages model; his prideful, martial kings come from the times the stories were being told, not from the time they are set in. Can you describe the LBA as a time dominated by warlords and conflict? Sure, but that's not the cities.

If for nothing else than the obsessive record-keeping in the Linear B tablets, I'd want to call the cities massive bureaucracies. But there's more. A stultifying sameness of cultural materials that can't be explained in terms of style or koine; the stacks of near-identical feasting ware produced at Petsas House by potters who could and did also make unique and artistic ware, by the large-scale re-arrangements of city walls and wells that could only happen with an imposed plan from above. And this isn't at all odd for post neolithic, early bronze age cultures; the mind immediately springs to examples in Mesoamerica, or closer to home, Hittite and Babylonian and, almost a crowning glory of the form, Egypt.

Not to say they didn't have kings. The Amarna letters (and Hittite and Ugaritic) capture correspondence written from one "Great King" to another (for many -- particularly for the Egyptian correspondents -- the Mycenae didn't make the grade). Treaties were written between kings, not between nations. But then, the idea of a nation was still developing. It is again possible to read too much into this; it could mean as little as scribes adding a king name the way I used to add the CO's signature block during my Radar O'Reilly days.

After all, for all that Ramesses II has carved that he personally raised a temple at Karnak, it is unlikely he got even as close to supervise a work gang. Or maybe not. Pharaohs did rule from the front during war. He probably didn't personally turn around the Battle of Kadesh by shooting a thousand chariots down with his own bow, but he most certainly was in the thick of the battle (even if it was the result of some really, really bad planning).

(One is tempted to throw religion into the mix, even more tempted to single the Pharaohs -- who as of the post Amarna period are finally using that name -- as explicitly divine. But no. Pharaoh was breathed the grace of Amun at conception but was at best a demi-god, divinity borrowed for his or her lifetime. Half the characters in Homer have a god on one side or the other of their family (even if the god was a giant swan at the time). And they, too, are given temporary mandates from the gods as well as various convoluted promises. And not a few prophesies, which even the gods feared.)

(So while there is evidence that something as simple as the weekly dinner put on for the hard workers at the palace -- this is a sheer estimate based on averages of grains collected and given as wages -- may have had religious trappings, it could defensibly be characterized as anything from a solemn religious ceremony in which miraculous food is made available from the very hands of the God-King to the way the bosses in Production will on random Fridays get pizzas for the whole floor.)

So what is happening in the LBA? Powerless kings at the heads of unwieldy bureaucracies beset by second sons and ambitious generals and angry peasants who have all started to go A Viking in the general collapse? Or are the kings a more intimate part of this, perhaps with more active, more martial ones swept in on a wave of blood? Or are we overstating the character of the mobilization, and this is more a drift of refugees than it is fleet of warships attacking the coasts?

Yeah, enough of the city. Let's go out to the mountains, like the closest and most famous Mountain Sanctuary (which may have been discontinued way back in Middle Minoan times and may or may not be distinct from Cave Sanctuaries) to Knossos. Which is also the birthplace of Zeus. Who may or may not be the same Zeus. And from the evidence, the people of the classical age may have been just as confused.

Gods merge and change anyhow. Athena is merely a local Potnia (which itself is more a title than a name) and there was no Aphrodite in the Mycenaean texts. So much for the Judgement of Paris. And there's at least one clearly Indo-European god still hanging on from his long journey out from...the Tigris and Euphrates, perhaps? And peoples. At the time Evans was painting his concrete columns a ponderous Victorian brown and refusing to lower himself to drinking locally-made wine there were recognizably ethnically distinct hill tribes on Crete. There's a dozen or so invasions to shake things up between the LBA and his time, though, so hardly seems worth it to investigate. Still, Homer does describe Crete as being a mix of languages...

Enough. It is time to sit my goat-girl down at a loom and start the plots moving around her.

A Doctor a Day Keeps Apple Away

Over an hour of practice yesterday. Put down ten bucks for a practice room and blew trumpet until my lips gave out. But they recovered; I was able to work more of the Hellboy theme when I got home (Weird fingering. First time I've had all three valves down at once.)

Oh and by the way; chin vibrato is easy on the trumpet now. It just hit, and I have no trouble at all applying it at will. Unfortunately my multiphonics are not keeping pace. I can growl one note fine but it messes me up trying to do quick slotting into another note. I'm sorta split now on Hellboy whether to stick with the original idea of harmon mute, go full open (and growl), or...pick up a pixie stonelined and a plunger and do it that way. Whatever. That octave leap is still a pain all by itself.

Oh, yeah. Horn was starting to feel funny so I took it apart for thorough cleaning. That leadpipe was foul. Corrosion starting on the exposed brass of the slides, too. I polished them up and was liberal with the slide grease when I re-assembled. I'm starting to rethink upgrading to a used Conn. Not sure I want all the maintenance!




That and fifteen minutes on violin during my afternoon break and about ten minutes guitar in the evening mostly working that fast back-and-forth pick action. That's gotten decent enough on the .020" pick I'm ready to take it up to a harder pick.

Arm vibrato has also taken off. So much so I have trouble forcing a wrist vibrato and I don't like the way it sounds when I do. Once you've got arm, you can go deeper and slower and the whole thing is much smoother. That's because there's so much more weight (and larger muscles) in the arm; you've got a full pendulum to shift and damp in a regular oscillation. In the wrist vibrato it's basically antagonistic muscles only; instead of being applied against the inertia of a weight in motion, the muscles are forced against each other until the wrist trembles.

Over-simplifying, but you get the idea. Wrist is choppy, and because your hand remains in contact with the violin the depth is less. Arm you can use the weight of that arm to force your finger completely flat and get a very wide vibrato, and because of the damping effect of pushing into the fleshy limits the motion is much more of a sine curve.




I'm overdue to make some progress videos. I was doing a regular series of the first few terrible weeks of picking up violin (and later, trumpet). But I got all of a dozen views each so I don't feel terribly obligated to keep it up.

No new music yet. Want to rehearse the Terminator parts for another week before I record. That first guitar part is still hairy but the penny whistle is bearing so much of the weight of the composition it really has to be lyrical and intense and that comes with being really comfortable with it.

A couple of snakes

This is the sort of post that really should have footnotes. But this is my blog, not my book; I'd rather blather on in a stream-of-consciousness way, rarely slowing to even look up spelling.

Evans and Schliemann. It is odd how Evans gets more of a pass these days, considering how many deep similarities there really were between the two. It is sort of surprising these days when you run into a mention of Schliemann that takes him at face value; the "Discoverer of Troy" and all that. The guilding has rubbed off that one.

Both bought the land they excavated. Typical and accepted practice for the day. Schliemann does come off worse because he had an arrangement with the Turks to split the loot (non-western countries were catching up to the value, financial and nationalistic, in museum-worthy cultural artifacts) but he hid the good stuff and smuggled it out of the country anyhow.

Both essentially hired forgers, although Schliemann feels more underhanded about it (some people still think the "Mask of Agamemnon" is a modern forgery). Evans happily described his concrete-cast pillars and the frescoes painted by French artist friends of his with a term that hints the work is less "restoration" and more "recreation."

In the end, both came out of a specific cultural understanding of the cultures they unearthed, an understanding strongly colored by their own life stories, and both shaped not just how they interpreted the cultural materials they found but how they proceeded (in both cases, often destructively) in their investigations.

(Just to add to the problem of reconstructed "Minoan" palaces and repainted "Minoan" frescoes -- as none other than Evelyn Waugh put it, apparently the Minoans had a great fondness for the cover of Vogue -- another recent and exhaustive study of forgeries made for the antiquities trade found the vast majority of those so enigmatic and suggestive Snake Goddess figurines showed no sign of having ever been near Minoan hands.)




Two odd statuary tidbits. First is Venus figurines. Perfect name, really. It jumps right up and cuts off the instinct to view them according to modern standards of beauty and makes you consider that there are many plausible options as to how the culture that created them, saw them.

The name, alas, has two origins. The class artifact, the Venus of Willendorf, was named thus inspired by the appearance of Sara Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited on the London stage in the early 1800's under the name "The Hottentot Venus."

(After her death in essentially slavery she was dissected by Georges Cuvier...in that era's toxic atmosphere of scientific racism, and her corpse remained on exhibit until the 1970's. Her remains were finally repatriated to South Africa in 2002 and there was a nice ceremony to welcome her home.)




On a much brighter note, a recent anatomical reconstruction of the missing arms of the Venus de Milo suggests that she held a pose that would have been familiar to women of all classes from the Bronze Age out to Chaucer's time (where whilst spinning wheels were available, the distaff and drop-spindle were still in use).

She is, in short, spinning.

(Just a note for those not up on the social context. Spinning and weaving were necessary and time-consuming activities for pre-industrial societies but they were not class-restricted. One of the qualities of a well-bred woman of the nobility was weaving. Weaving finer clothes and more delicate patterns than the hoi polloi, of course, but still hand weaving. In Homer, Helen weaves. Penelope weaves -- and, as famously, unravels.)

Electrical Memories

I was freelancing as a set builder when the economy crashed. Packed myself off to Boston for a winter season, sleeping on the floor at a friend's house, while I recovered financially. Followed a show back to California and three days after I got back there was a call from someone I'd designed a show for at a six tin-can pub with a ten foot wide stage.

I ended up spending ten years working as Master Electrician at a small theater tucked into an unincorporated area near Hayward. That's where I started getting serious about sound, and composing. That was the time most of my MIDI-keyboard and rack mount synthesizer stuff was written.

So here's another blast from the past:

We'd do about six shows a years; two musicals to get butts in seats and four plays that with luck would earn back their costs. Then two to four concerts from our associated 80-member community chorus.

My friend Don Tieck did most of the composing chores on the straight plays. I had Lend Me a Tenor and A Man for All Seasons to myself. A couple more shows -- like Play it Again, Sam -- that were drop-needle. And when we had the 20th anniversary gala I was asked to write something to accompany the slide show.

So that's it. Bombast around a simple fanfare, ducking into a few different moods and styles to represent the variety of our shows, heavily referencing some of my friend's favorite orchestration tricks in honor of his work, and ending with a long trail-out because the slide show wasn't exactly timed.

And, yes...almost all keyboard work, but there is a wee bit of "Baaaand in a Box" in a couple measures. (The friend who'd made that phone call always pronounced it like the chorus in that Wings song.)




Pretty primitive. I look back on those days and there were a lot of times I pushed for more musical respect than I had earned. I'm not saying my stuff is that bad to listen to, but I lack the theory and associated musical skills to communicate and integrate and there were times when I butted heads with a conductor because I wanted to try something but I didn't have the skills to carry it off.

And now? The big thing is I have a day job that pays better and gives me free time on a more regular schedule. That means I can finally afford "real" instruments and even a little time to practice on them. Makes me no more of a musician than I was before, though; just faking it in a new way.

Today wasn't terribly unproductive. I got 20-30 minutes of practice in (dragged my horn out to Guitar Center after brunch but the piano rooms didn't open that early in the day.) I can hit the notes on the Hellboy trumpet part but it's still a nasty leap. Can get through a bar of Godfather before my pick can't handle faking a mandolin any longer. And the Terminator penny whistle part is getting close to recording quality.

I finally found the combination that works on that piece, at least for the beginning. It's mostly back in a MIDI mock-up, with just the low bodhran part and the "great highland crumhorn" as acoustic material. 

I still don't know if I can go full Celtic, and if it is worth continuing to mess with the mockup or if I should record what I have so far. There's a tough finger-picking arpeggio on the folk guitar that I wouldn't mind a few more days of practice on before I turn on the microphones. And I'm so far off the bar lines now I'm really not sure the best way to notate my parts for the recording session.

The vague plan is to blow through this one, then see if my horn is up to doing Hellboy yet. For which I'd love to give Don a call because buying bongos, much less a 14 x 5.5" wood-shell snare with stand and brushes at this moment would be silly.

I also have vague thoughts as to doing a mini-lecture on the evolution of the Nathan McCree Tomb Raider motif over the multiple games. Which reminds me -- I dreamed up a possible motif for my own "Tomb Raider: Legacy" sketch, which is sitting on my phone right now if I am lucky.

"How do I get to Carnegie Hall?"

For all that the double-whammy of doxy and prednisone is doing to me, got some good practice in today. Did a "naked" session on the violin. I can actually do arm vibrato without a shoulder rest, even though it threatens to yank the fiddle out from under my chin. And my bowing didn't fall to pieces without that extra stability, either. Shoulder rest is the default, but it seems a useful exercise to go without every now and then. Sort of a sanity check on how I'm orienting to the instrument.

Trumpet is finally starting to slot properly again. If I feel good tomorrow I'm taking it to a piano room where I can open it up a little -- I'm getting tired of fighting the back-pressure of those practice mutes.

I have the penny whistle to the point where doing the finger tremolo is feeling natural, and the cuts and strikes feel good, too. Still a bit of a squeak changing octaves (going chromatic, you have to go from all fingers off to all fingers down and back again).

Guitar is progressing more slowly. Working on fast-picking right now; varying between James Bond theme on the low E and Godfather on the high E to work that double-pick action. My softest pick, held right up at the tip and slightly angled. The latest is cut from a scrap sheet of .020" styrene. Maybe I should take a few out to TheShop.build (sigh) and laser them out.



And yeah, that's how I practice. I'd like to spend more time. Really, I would. Instead of laps, though, I do wind sprints. It's not a way to become a good musician. It is a way to get competent, fast.

The big trick is concentration. Almost nothing is relaxed. But the big trick is keeping the balance. Don't fall into wasting time on easy rote exercises. But don't beat yourself up trying and failing at something that's beyond you. Stay right at the edge, just past your comfort level, because that's where you gain the fastest.

I split my time roughly in thirds. One third in pure exercises. These are designed to highlight one aspect but the trick to them is doing them slow and smooth and doing everything right. Like this week was all silent bow changes, on one note at a time. Adding arm vibrato when I was ready for it, but all through keeping an eye on tone, angle, Kreisler Highway, shoulder tension, etc.

(A note; vibrato and tremolo have distinct meanings but there are traditional ways of referring to certain effects on certain instruments and I bow to those in my usage.)

Another third is in experimentation. This is in trying things I can't do yet, or do very well. I'm constantly inventing exercises to work on a specific problem spot.

The last third (these are only rough in terms of time) is playing actual pieces. There are two advantages here. One is to keep your spirits up -- one can only stomach so many scales. The other is because when you concentrate in on just one technical problem you risk solving it in a way that won't work in the context of actual performance. The flip side is actual performance reveals weaknesses you wouldn't have discovered otherwise.

I spend roughly equal time to my instrument-in-hand practice time listening to other players, watching other players, reading up on technique, and thinking about what I've learned and what I should try next.

And, yeah, there's cross-over. No matter the instrument I'm practicing at the moment, I'm refining muscle and breath control, refining my pitch sense and rhythm, etc. I actually think practicing multiple instruments helps. It's like doing circuit training; I lose my lips for trumpet quickly but I can switch to another wind and keep learning. Or to a guitar and get my fingers a workout.



Music is going much more slowly. I'm on the fifth sketch for Terminator and still not happy. I have this idea in the back of my head of crossing it with "Toss the Feather" and in my head it sounds like it should work...of course my fiddle playing isn't up to that point yet...

I am also refining my ideas towards a Hellboy cover but there's a one-octave leap on the trumpet part that's still tough for me. Plus I haven't had the bass out of the case for a while, even if it is a simple riff. Pretty sure the original is bass guitar and french horn to start -- I'm having to pitch it up quite a bit to do the horn part on trumpet but going to try keeping the pahoehoe on my SUB for the nonce and use that upright bass-like sound instead.

Flirted with the idea of getting a snare and brushes but if I get that far, I'll toss the idea towards my drummer friend Don and see if he wants to record the drum tracks instead. That would be a lot of fun.

Give me that old-time religion

I'm almost ready to start plotting in earnest. Just have one major area to clear up before I go. One more research task, one that has sent me out with a brand-new JSTOR membership (or, rather, a reduced-access monthly pass) to do research.

And that is religion.



As an aside, I have some new aphorisms I've been working on when trying to understand history, or writing historical fiction:

"The past has a past." Bronze age empires of the near east had their own antiquarians. There were New Kingdom scholars who were working on restoration projects. The pyramids, after all, were older to Cleopatra than she is to us.

"It was never the past in the past." No person of any time thought of themselves of living in a quaint previous time. They all lived in the modern world, one that was highly advanced -- if not dangerously modern.

"People are complicated." No society was ever doing things simply, using simple language, thinking in simple ways. Anatomically modern humans go back way further than history, almost as far as archaeological artifacts, and they are always pushing the boundaries of what is possible. We may have massive computer-controlled looms these days, but send a modern back to pre spinning-wheel, pre treadle loom, and they are still going to find it a lifetime prospect to get really good at weaving.

Fortunately as a fiction writer I feel less constrained to find "the" way some historical element should have been. Instead I'm picking what works best dramatically. The problem I'm facing right now is not a lack of freedom, but too much of it. I need to be guided a little more about what is historically plausible in order to narrow down on all the directions I could be taking things in the narrative.

So we know only a little about Mycenaean religion, and half of that is assuming continuity into the later Greeks. We know even less about the Minoans. The fun thing about religion, from a writer's point of view, is that archaeology preserves outward forms but not inward meanings. We know there were places where people gathered and while they were there ate and drank from pottery that occurs no-where else. But we don't know if this was an offering to the gods or a tailgate party. Even when we have a shrine and what appears to be offerings, we don't know how they thought of the ritual, what they meant by it, what they gained from it.

There is one thing, though, one thing which is intriguing me although it also makes my plotting problems more difficult. The Greeks don't have a creator figure. The familiar Greek gods, Zeus on down, didn't create the world or humanity. They are merely another inhabitant. When you get closer to the original documents, the term "immortals" seems to come closer. They are a people like humans but better in every way; stronger, longer lived, better artists...heck, they are a bit like some depictions of the Fair Folk. They aren't our guardians or shepherds. At best, they are amused by us, as we are by the frolicking of wild animals, and vain enough so they can sometimes be cajoled into doing us favors (and also petty enough so when annoyed by us, they can wreak terrible vengeance.)

Everyone has creation myths. But looking around for a Creator, the Abrahamic religions start to look like the odd man out. It's probably an effect of packing all the roles and obligations into a single entity. And probably why Christianity in many of its flavors ends up with so many saints -- they're a lot easier to pray to.

The Egyptians come across similarly, as the creator figures in their pantheon are terrible and distant even to the other gods. Or the Norse gods, who similarly more-or-less inherited the world and in any case were more interested in their own affairs than those of mortals. I have to say I have a certain fondness for the Egyptian gods, who come across to me like working stiffs. They all have duties, often onerous and even dangerous jobs they have to do to keep the cosmos running. One almost feels bad tugging on their sleeve to get them to take some time away from their busy day to deal with your own petty little problems. Didn't seem to bother the ancient Egyptians, though, who were actively pestering them for favors.

In any case. Much as we don't know about the Minoan religion, there have been (basically unsupported and often fanciful) theories. Prime among them being a Mother Goddess cult. Which suggests to me a much more active role, both in creating the world and in caring about some of that creation. Apollo might help out if you bribed him enough (one suspects bribes, no matter how they are rationalized by the people making them, are the one truly cross-cultural constant of worship). A Mother would, you think, help because she wanted to.

On that note I'm not sure which religions have figures that have a duty towards humanity. The mesoamerican entities seemed to have a reciprocal working relationship; you keep us fed with blood, we'll be able to keep the world from collapsing. I feel like some of the First Nations had entities with more of a parental feel to them, though. I am hardly an authority on world mythologies!

Back to the Mycenae. Through into at least Roman times there were multiple local deities and private worship practices, most famously (!!) the Mystery Cults. There's some evidence of cultic practices in Mycenae and Minoan times; places of worship that seem to be local and private. And there is tons of evidence (well, within the context of how much we have overall) of specific gods -- or at least similarly-named ones -- getting carried through from one culture to another.

So it isn't the least bit contentious to say that on 12th-century BC Crete there would be a continuation of Minoan worship practices -- at least in remote areas, but possibly quite openly and alongside of whatever passes for mainstream religion (possibly state-sponsored...there are more often than not links between power and worship, with rulers being priests or at least having religious duties).

And, yeah, from the first moment I heard of them I wanted Kes to have originally come from one of the Peak Sanctuaries. More and more, I don't think she was an actual priestess, but it still leaves open the question of how much she learned, whether this was a carry-over Minoan practice, whether such carry-over practices are known and understood more widely, and what form they might have.

This could as I said go in a dozen directions. One of the things I'm playing with is about the past of the past. The evidence of the Etocretan language, some inscriptions, some names and of course a semi-continuity of artistic traditions (that blends into the later Mycenaean) is that a "Minoan" identity could still be filtered out of the mainstream culture. One of my conceits for the novel is that the people who chose for various reasons of identity (largely, class) to recognize themselves as distinct are having to reconstruct from scattered sources -- and they get it about as right as Sir Arthur Evans did.

Lately I've thought I want more than one reconstruction going on, and I think the Peak Sanctuaries (and other Mystery Cults) may play into this; that there are self-identified Etocretans who imagine themselves descendants of a powerful thallasocracy -- myth-making that verges on Atlantean here, with powerful fleets, rich kings, weapons of a finer metal than anything available today. And then there are others who disagree; these are a direct and obvious call-out to The Chalice and the Blade, being a peaceful mother-goddess harmony-of-nature bunch who were all but wiped out by those warlike Mycenaeans.

Which is why I'm deep into reading papers at JSTOR.

Adaptations for Strings and Winds

It has been so long I no longer remember what it was like to pick up an instrument for the very first time. That instrument was almost certainly piano, with recorder following after. I was too poor to consider brass or strings and the guitar cut my fingers (as it does to everybody) but eventually I got a ukulele which is much gentler instrument to learn on. Ten years after that...it starts to steam-roller.

So I can't say what it is like to try to play from the position of a complete novice. But I can say what it is like to transition from certain starter instruments to others of a similar family.

 Start with Ukulele. This is a 3D model I was giving away to the Poser community, but it is an accurate scale model of my Rogue soprano uke. (Which of course now has Aquila Nygut strings).

Take note that I spent long enough at it to learn standard strum, pick, and finger-picking, at least a dozen chords, and some basic techniques like hammer-ons and lift-offs, slides and bending.

From Uke to Guitar:

Fairly painless. The top strings have the same interval pattern (keeping in mind the re-entrant tuning of the bottom string on the uke) so uke chords transfer right over. 

This is a steel-string 3/4 scale Yamaha JR2 folk guitar; the strings do cut into my fingers a bit and the nut is narrow enough to make finger-picking more difficult. Other than that...it opens up the tonal possibilities, has deeper bass and more sustain, but I can do exactly what I used to do on the uke and it sounds just fine.

From Uke to Electric Guitar:

Not really fair, as this started life as an electric ukulele. I'd long ago stuck a piezo pick-up in my Rogue ukulele and had already messed around a little with distortion pedal. So this is really more of the same; bigger, metal strings, more pick work, more tonal options. Not really much of an adjustment to start playing.

(Like the folk guitar, the hurdle is learning how to take advantage of the new possibilities of the instrument. Also, the ukulele is more forgiving; the guitars pick up more of the fret noise and finger brushes and other stray sounds, and that longer sustain means you have to pay more care to damping or re-fingering.)

Oh, right. That's a Vorson FSUK1BK solid-body electric ukulele, currently pitched to guitar top four with a set of nickel-wound D'Addario EJ22 "Jazz Medium Gauge" guitar strings.

From Uke to Bass:

Again not really fair; this is a Kala U-bass.* Means it has the body and frets of a baritone ukulele even as it is pitched as a standard four-string bass. 

The frets are wider spread, meaning changes in how you finger (particularly, that fourth-finger stretch is now hard enough you are better off re-mapping it). More importantly, it is ultra-sensitive to good fretting and the strings pick up every bit of finger noise. Damping is all but mandatory.

*SUB solid-body model with flame maple finish, retro-fit with "California" pre-amp with built-in tuner, still hung with the original Pahoehoe strings from Road Toad.

From (basically) Ukulele to Violin:

Okay, this one is a big transition. It would be shorter to list what I was able to carry over from the ukulele than what I had to learn. Which is strength and accuracy in the fretting hand, mostly. Even though a violin has no frets, there's still muscle memory in going to the right spot in both instruments so that's a skill that translates over. 

Other than that, what I had to draw on was a little music theory, the start of ear training, and the ability to think in terms of relative strings; remapping on the fly based on the interval between strings to figure out where the next note would be located.

Everything else is learned from scratch. Holding the bow. Holding the instrument. Bowing. Fingering. Months before I could get through a simple tune without going haywire. Two years now and I still squeak and scratch.

Actually, I'd say the biggest leg up I got from the ukulele is I knew I could learn an instrument because I'd done it once before.

(The instrument pictured is my second violin. I started on a Cecilio solid-body electric violin, then moved up to a Pfetchner student violin. As of a week ago I re-strung it with Alphayue strings, which are synthetic core and I find have a warmer and more responsive tone.) D'addario natural light rosin and the original Pfetchner bow, Bonmusica shoulder rest, and Guaneri chin rest.)

From Violin to Chincello:

Also not really fair, this is my original Cecilio CEVN-2BK electric violin -- what Yamaha calls a "silent violin" -- newly strung with Sensicore octave strings; or rather, a CGDA set custom-assembled by the Electric Violin Shop to bring a violin body down to cello pitches. Still using the Crescent carbon-fibre bow and Everest shoulder rest, but now rosining up with Nyman bass rosin.

The transition here is basically that the strings are thick and heavy as heck. It takes a hard bow and a firm grip in fretting, and you have to learn to play a little slower and let the strings catch up.

In short, the transition to other members of the lute family is nearly painless. Within a day of picking up each I was playing again and could put my attention on the fun stuff, like trying out new techniques -- or trying to play cleaner. The bowed strings are a lot more like learning an instrument from scratch.

Next there's the wind and brass to consider. Here's my starting point; decades of recorder, during which, although I may never have gotten that good, I messed around with a lot of different techniques including flutter tongue, fingered tremolo, diaphragm vibrato, "chanter" fingering, and multiphonics. I also had half a suite of recorders, from sopranino to alto, so I was used to changing the width of my grip.

Not to mention a growing collection of Pier 49 "bamboo flutes" and a couple of Early instruments.

From Recorder to Crumhorn:

Another nothing transition. The fingering is slightly different. And it is a reed-cap instrument so the tonguing is different; instead of stopping your tongue against your teeth you stop by putting your tongue over the hole. Other than that, all that time learning breath control and clean fingering translates right over.

This crumhorn is a Susato alto crumhorn in ABS plastic with two extension keys and a plastic reed.

From Recorder to Tin Whistle:

Actually a tougher transition, but only towards playing the tin whistle idiomatically. The fingering is quite different and the articulation is very different (typically little to no tonguing) and the idiom is to do a lot of cuts and strikes and trills. Oh, yeah, and whether or not the traditionalists frown on diaphragm vibrato, the cool thing to have in your box of tricks is fingered "vibrato." (Fluttering a finger rapidly on or over a tone hole one or two holes below the lowest fingered hole).

Pictured is a Feadog "Generation," probably a Bb like mine. I also own a Clarke in the traditional high D.

From Recorder to Trumpet:

The biggie here. Now, I had tried to buzz into a brass mouthpiece before I got it, so I knew I could at least make a tone. I'd also messed around on a Breton Bombarde (what musicologists call a "folk oboe") a double reed of the shawm family originally fitted with a tough-as nails straw reed. So I could shove air.

Brass, though. This was a steep learning curve for the first couple weeks, both learning the basic embouchure and getting enough lip strength to play for longer than a minute at a time. After that first few weeks, though, it got easier; it takes less pressure, less effort, I can go more easily into the higher registers and concentrate more on tone and clarity and all that other fun stuff.

So now I'm messing with wah-wah mute, multiphonics, slides...but I have yet to care a whit about using the tuning slides (I just lip the worst of the notes and call truce on the rest).

What did recorder do for me? Breath control, and a hint at slotting with that recorder overblow to second and third octaves (on the trumpet, you "overblow" through the harmonic series.) 

Medini/Cecilio MTT-BL Bb trumpet with blue finish. I'm using a classic Harmon mute with stem, a LotFancy compact practice mute, and now, a Yamaha Silent Brass practice mute with built-in microphone. Plus I'm on my second can of Spitballs -- I swear by those things to keep the trumpet clean.

Musician-Shaped Objects

I've decided it makes no sense to hold a single position on cheap musical instruments. The reason is, there's not one kind of musician.



I sort of have a hard time going into the headspace of a band student now.

(I wish I'd done band as a child. The practice, the skilled instruction, but more than that, playing with other people, playing what you are handed, playing when required. The chance to get real-world performance chops and the exposure to so much of the standard literature. Learning on your own, it is too easy to be a two-trick pony; to learn just enough to get by on whatever it is you are currently interested in.)

In any case, band is demanding. You need an instrument that can stand up to constant use. You need one that meets standards; you can't chart around the weaknesses of a bad instrument. And you need one that is made of good materials with standard fittings so when the inevitable breakage occurs it can be repaired.

The learning process of a student is different. You are learning everything at once; musical ear, notation, pitch relationships, rhythmic sensibility, and -- assuming you are young enough -- the basics of fine motor control.

The student needs a decent instrument. They don't have the experience or the leeway to be struggling with their own instrument. So no cheap instruments. Not even used instruments -- unless you can afford to take it to a professional and get it repaired tuned and properly setup. So rental from a company that does rentals, or put down the money for a decent student instrument from a name brand. Anything else is a disservice to the student -- and to their instructor and their bandmates.

For this market, the hundred-dollar Big Box instruments are a disservice, no, worse, a trap, and can not be sufficiently condemned.



And then there's the other musicians. I'm going to leave aside the professional gigging musician, because that isn't a group who has a need to shop for low-priced instruments.

Instead I mean everyone from the fifty-bucks-a-service pit musician or the pick-up band or the home recordist. People who aren't making a living at it, and don't see themselves on the career path to a chair in a regional symphony orchestra.

For these people this is a golden age; used instruments, cheap instruments, experimental instruments. They move in an environment that is open to experimentation and flexible about what can and can't be achieved. It won't blow the second octave? Rewrite the part. Out of tune? Fix it in the mix. A key fell off? Glue or the appropriate fixit skill. The whole instrument fell apart? Well, then it was a noble experiment and it isn't like they have to have one for class in the morning.




The latest to catch my eye is the Yamaha Venova. Billed as a "Casual Wind Instrument" it is planted as a weird cross between a student saxophone and the kind of ABS recorder found in every classroom. It is pitched as a soprano sax and more-or-less sounds like one but has very few keys; most of the holes are played with the bare finger, just like on recorder. It is even designed so with one quick adjustment it is fingered recorder-style.

It is of a folded-pipe design and to give it an even more space-age appearance there is a weird funnel-like extension. Although it is a cylindrical bore instrument, the extension changes the harmonic series and makes it overblow at the octave like a sax. Interestingly enough, if you stopper the extension, it sounds like a clarinet...just a clarinet that won't play in pitch (as the keys no longer line up with the harmonic series).




Truthfully, I don't know if "experimental" (or should you call them "novelty") instruments are cheaper because of intrinsic qualities (the electric ukulele, for instance, has only four string and is smaller than a guitar, meaning less material) or because they haven't been accepted widely enough. I suspect the latter, because Ubasses are coming out now that cost several times what the first crop did.

What I do know is these are new enough to bypass the "academy" thinking that swarms around established instruments. What I said above about the student versus the adult amateur stands, but I've found a great many people don't understand or can't accept the later group. They get almost angry about anyone who won't get a proper instrument and sit down in proper classes -- with the unsaid expectation of playing semi-professionally ten, twenty years down the road.

Some people can throw every waking hour and every spare dollar into their hobby. Most of us don't. There is music to be had outside of the standard path. And for those on that path, even the instrument-shaped object takes on a very different shape.

I still think you are better off with a used instrument or an experimental instrument, but if you have sufficient skills and the fortitude to stomach blowing a few hundred bucks on something that doesn't work at all, they have their place. That said, most of mine are modded now, making them more experimental than cheap.



Oh, yeah. And the adult beginner?  I mean, a true beginner to performance? Your path should look more like the band student's path. Except as an adult you need (and can afford, both mentally and financially, an accelerated profile). Rent a decent student instrument. Hire a one-on-one instructor. You don't have the luxury of endless rote practice time and you don't have the background to hack it alone. And you, too, should stay away from those damned ISOs.

Call me Deacon Blues

That's how back-burner thinking works. You let the problem simmer, dropping new ingredients in randomly as you come across them and not really paying attention to what's really starting to look like stone soup. Cold stone soup.

And then one day it boils over, and you can hardly write fast enough to take down all the insights as everything starts to fall together. And there went that metaphor...just couldn't keep it all in the pot.

Was re-reading the discussion in Eric Cline's 1177 about the archaeological (and paleobotanical) evidence for drought and subsequent famine around the time of the LBA Collapse in the Aegean. I'd been thinking of the story of Hathor's wrath as described in the first part of the Book of the Heavenly Cow, and inspired by the Red Weed that appears in later parts of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, I'd been thinking of something symbolic, some kind of invasive species or something, that could be thematically linked to the wave of destruction and chaos.

And there's one available. A literal crimson tide; a harmful algal bloom. It's dinoflagellates, occurs in a variety of colors including red, may be climate-linked, and contains a variety of neurotoxins.

And it just keeps getting better. It's red, linking to the Hathor myth and echoing many Biblical and Homeric descriptions of rivers running red with blood and blood staining the seas. And specifically one of the Plagues of the Bible. It contains neurotoxin that can cause memory loss, seizures, and death as well as behavioral changes; off the California Coast there was the famous "Chaotic Seabirds" incident -- tentatively linked to domoic acid -- that inspired Hitchcock's The Birds. And oh yes; it is particularly concentrated in shellfish, making a weak link to certain dietary laws.

As soon as I'd set that down I read that the palatial economies may have been peculiarly susceptible to disruptions of trade. Which for the palaces is largely luxury goods. Conveniently, my Kes, as a skilled weaver, is employed by or for the palace and thus is part of the creation of those goods. Which are traded with, among other places, Egypt. Meaning a possible official reason for Setna to be visiting, who (since Egypt is largely self-sufficient) has an outsider's perspective to the impact and vulnerability of this luxury trade.

Which leads to the particular impact piracy had on Mycenae, who as a warrior culture (who might even have some of the drawbacks of the later Spartan system, oppressed underclass and all) really suffer from Peak Tin. (Amusingly enough, there are multiple scenes in The Illiad where a bronze weapon breaks and no spare is readily available, leading the heroes to attack with rocks and fists).

So is the Trojan War then an attempt to secure trade routes, particularly to that essential tin? Could this be similar to or part of the documented trade embargo imposed on "Ahiyawa" by the Hittite Empire? So either attacking the Hittites in the Troad or trying to open up better routes around them by going after Wilusa? And could the pressure of the old embargo become suddenly critical because pirates have started blocking other trade routes? Or maybe they pulled a dirty trick at Byblos and the loose-knit "Phoenician" peoples imposed their own embargo?

And these pirates. Perhaps the peasant revolt on Crete succeeded, perhaps it failed, but either way there is the start of movement of people and some of them are taking to ships. And even though they may be speaking a different Greek dialect and have their own peculiar variations in material culture this only echoes the "Dorian Invasion" -- which if it took place at all, took place hundreds of years later. But it is still a way of looking at the changes, of migration and of revolution, that are spreading across the Peloponnese and up into the Greek Mainland.

And for some reason this brings me back to gods. I'm reversing myself sort of. No gods will appear in person in the narrative. The characters will act as if their existence and their acts are obvious. However! There will be things that do not have a strictly rational explanation, and they will fall outside that which can be explained away.

Kes is going to keep her ability to see texts from the future, although I've been modifying how that works and how she interacts with it as my understanding of my nerdy, upbeat little goat-girl is ongoing. The Red Tide gives a thin excuse for some weird behavior, including specifically some convenient cultists who show up with literally uncanny prescience to harry the protagonists. And lastly I'm really thinking of having a certain god talk anyhow; but through a shaman. But again, not a deniable magic; the shaman will distinctly say things that she has no good reason to know.





All in all a very productive morning. I've got a doctor's appointment later today and I'm really hopeful I'm going to be able to clear up my breathing problems and that's going to really improve my work on the trumpet. No plans to learn to play the saxophone, though. Not yet. (Not saying I'm not really tempted by Yamaha's Venova....)

Doing Violins

Finally time and focus to get back to practice.

The task this month is to finish the change-over to the new shoulder rest and a proper vibrato grip. No more death-grip on the neck. I'm working through my scales and the various shifts and string crosses but now with my hand as free and relaxed as I can get it.

I can do arm vibrato now but it is going to take a while to integrate it and to refine it. I've got some depth and speed control but I'm still having fun keeping the instrument stable with a smooth bow stroke. Add the silent reverses and....

Of course on the violin there's never a single position. It isn't like piano where once you get your hands set right you pretty much use them like that. On violin every note, every problem is a different hand position with its own unique muscle memory. The shape of the hand for the A string doesn't get you to the G string. You can have a nice open hand and full arm vibrato in first position, but up in fourth position you are wrapping your hand up around the upper bought in order to reach the notes and -- at least for me -- reduced to hand vibrato.

And of course you change depending on how fast the passage is, how loud, where the next note is. Each note is available in multiple places. I've been working my scales without open strings now, so going from four to one, then back one to four (the former I find easy, the latter is giving me trouble. Don't know why but my bow angles when I go in for that fourth finger on the way down). But you might have a fast passage where it makes sense to skip the harder fingering and use the open string anyhow.

Or you might have a singing passage where to stay legato you stretch or do a shift on one string instead of crossing. You almost need to practice by the specific piece instead of by rote scales and exercises.



Anyhow. The chincello is up and running. Ordered some bass rosin for it (and still tempted by a carbon-fibre viola bow for more weight). So today I'm going to risk taking the strings off the Pfetchner and hang the Alphayues on  it instead.

Stations of the Cross

In Christian practice, this is a series of fourteen images from the Crucifixion that the worshipper visits in order, praying before each, recreating the Passion with their own journey.

The term got re-purposed in modified form as part of the critical language of Fan Fiction. There are at least a thousand fan-written stories that re-tell Harry Potter's first year at Hogwarts. Even though each is different, with a different focus, different endings, different characters, even wildly different settings, the cantus firmus of the original novel is still back there. And thus, even if the story is set in 1950 and "Harry" is a girl, a ward of Dick Tracey, and from the Moon*, she'll still be unwrapping chocolate frogs with Ron on the Hogwart's Express.

The big difference being that not all of the familiar incidents and characters show up. This is more a statistical tendency towards a relatively small number of popular items from the original canon. So it is a little more like one of those churches with multiple saints in their own individual niches and you can Chinese Menu which ones you visit.

A similar effect is in alternate history, where W.W.I. may have kept going into the early 40's and Bismark II is a nuclear-powered hovercraft....but Winston Churchill is (somehow) still PM (and Adolph gets a brief appearance in the text; even though he's a well-established portrait painter in Free Austria, you still have to visit that station.)

Video Games would seem a strange place for this effect. Even in the most linear game, however, you can as player establish a different internal life for your character. I can play Tomb Raider 2013, for instance, as a scared kid or as a roaring arc of revenge. The results are basically the same and the cutscenes are, alas, the same, but there are nuances in how the actual play unfolds.

A game like Skyrim is very, very open to different paths.



In Skyrim, there is a Main Campaign and a whole bunch of side quests. And there's also stuff to do, like explore, gather herbs, hunt, learn smithing, run a farm. You can (many do) play for hours without ever touching on any of the scripted content.

You can also pick and chose. The episodes of the Main Campaign must be completed in order, but there's no time limit. You can go away to fight the Thieve's Guild or become Arch-Mage of the College of Winterhold for a few months and come back...the dragons will still be waiting.

These form the stations. Not just the memorable incidents of the Main Campaign (the flight from Helgen, the summons of the Greybeards) but also the other accomplishments and memorable incidents from the longer side quests (meeting Torvald, adopting an orphan, making one hundred iron daggers).

Not only can multiple people play this game and have unique experiences -- sharing only these Stations of the Cross as they come across them -- but one person can play the game multiple times, again each time with a unique experience.

And that means even coming at the well-known, well-worn incidents again and again, there is still new insight and new delight. Meeting Ulfric Stormcloak for the second time is a lot different if you meet him as a young dark-elf mage, or as a sturdy Nord who already beat-down the only other known Dragonborn in dragon-to-dragon combat.



And, yeah, there went a few more hours. I've been working a late-night install (we have to start after the offices clear out) and it took a bit of work to flip my biological clock around.



* Free Plot Bunny!  I would totally read an H.P. fanfic in which Moon Maid (or Honeymoon) went to Hogwarts, and Voldemort joined Pruneface and Flattop and the other wackaloons in Tracey's Rogues Gallery.