Imperial Highway II

One of the prop-making blogs I follow is that of Harrison Krix -- Volpin Props. I have an amazed admiration for the care he takes in the final finish, in smoothing and sharpness of detail and surface treatments. He is also expanding more and more into technologies necessary to achieve the effects he is after.

That's not my model. Given my time and lack of concentration my intent is to leverage technology and every other time-saving, labor-saving shortcut both the long history of theatrical prop-making and the recent Maker Movement have made available.

And, yeah, I bet that laser engraving, possibly combined with some CNC routing, would have breezed through my current prop. Instead I've been hacking it out of raw wood with a primitive and basic selection of tools not too much evolved from obsidian flakes; X-acto blade, razor saw, and Squadron scribing tool.

Which also means a stop-and-start process; at every step I need to wait for glue to set or spot putty or primer paint to dry. Such as the detail being applied in the picture above.

I've looked at a lot of pictures, and even took screen shots from a Let's Play video. And I can definitely say the in-game model is inconsistent. In-game, it is created from several different shapes which are pushed together in a way that 3d rendering allows but physical materials do not. And there are other artifacts of the 3d nature of the original; textures, for instance, are flood-filled and are scaled inconsistently. The stones inside the blind arches, for instance, are of a different scale depending on how the model is being used on a particular game level.

So I'm having to tweak and change and choose to find compromises that look nice, are representative of the bulk of the images, and are mold-able: I'm also having to worry about gaps and seams and undercuts and blind corners that might be a problem when casting the final prop.

Reviews, Ridiculous to Sublime

Finally got around to watching the first Tomb Raider movie (saw some of it once, on a transatlantic flight...and fell asleep in the middle of it). Odd. It does a lot right, has a great look, a good energy, and there's a strong sense that everyone involved was enjoying themselves. But despite all of that, it is oddly...boring.

Perhaps it is the lack of strong music. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider had various problems coming up with a composer and the man who finally landed in the hot seat had only two weeks to work. Under similar conditions James Horner came up with Aliens, but Tomb Raider sounds as if made drop-needle from whatever euro-pop was lying around the room. It lacks grandeur, it lacks a linking theme, it lacks development. This is a film that could use the leit-motif treatment (as well as the rest of that Wagnerian grammar).

Jolie is wonderful. And the film does extremely well at translating the feel for the games, especially the kind of gymnastic action, without resorting to wirework and CGI and otherwise breaking (as so many action films do) the suspension of disbelief. Obviously she can't leap about like her game avatar, but although more realistic and plausible the physical stunts are still strong and entertaining.

The plot, on the other hand, also suffers from a lack of clarity. In this case I think it isn't so much a lack of focus as a lack of the concrete. Odd as it may be to say, there is more archaeology and history in the worst of the games than there is in the movie. The Illuminati are named. That's about it. There's not even a name given, much less a culture or history or religious tradition for the big temple set-piece (using some real places in Cambodia as background). Nothing is seen of Venice but the interior of a building. One bit of some script is translated by Lara (or rather, pretty much read outright in situ by the light of a chemlight) but there isn't even enough to define what language it might be.

In astronomy the movie does far worse. A grand conjunction is an important part of the plot, is shown from space, observed via telescope on Earth, and diagrammed by a giant orrery...except in none of these depictions do the film-makers appear to know which planets are involved, how many planets are in the solar system, or even what they look like. In all these depictions, they are a line of nearly identical yellow balls, with the sole exception that one has a ring.

(There is a vague moment in the orrery scene where some character interacts briefly with what might be a group of satellites arrayed at 90 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic, which is oddly suggestive of Uranus... but even that is giving the set design, as wonderful looking as the contraption is, too much credit).

Similar incoherence follows the McGuffin; what does it do, how it works. With the stakes so nebulous, the way to achieve the goal so ill-defined, and the map and clues non-existent, the entire struggle is pretty much, "Stuff happens, then some other stuff, then Lara wins."

Here's hoping the second movie is as much better as word has it is.




On the other side of the First Century silver boar-horse C type, I'm in the middle of the second Samantha Sutton book by James Jordan and they keep getting better and better. Cambridge and its surrounds are the setting for this one, and it is a Cambridge with all the hoary traditions and strange characters and long murky history of Douglas Adams. And a mystery and struggle over an archaeological site being excavated in haste ahead of a construction project; a struggle that pits not just cultural heritage against modern development, archaeologists versus looters (rather, the semi-respectable metal-detectorists of the English scene), and antiquities department against the upstart and more anthropologically-minded barbarians who study home-grown, pre-Roman cultures.

Jacobs does push, of course, allowing access in places his heroes really shouldn't have, bending rules they really should know better than to bend, and throwing in a few narrow scrapes that more should really be made more of (by local law enforcement, among others). But he really, really knows his settings, and he knows his archaeology, and he presents an honest appraisal of how the field works and some of its conflicts and hot topics as well as some of its problems...while keeping the narrative within range of a young reader.

I am all for these books, and hope I can find the third (and fourth, when it comes out).

Guns, Germs, and Naquadah

It should be obvious by now I've been immersing in history (and archaeology). I'm into immersion as a learning method. But this current spate is not exactly methodical, and I'm not even sure how much I'm learning. I'm still having trouble doing much more than work, sleep, eat. It is just that I'm filling the majority of those little gaps in the day with more-or-less the same subject.

Such as by listening to podcasts. Unlike doing sound, running a shop, painting scenery, or any of the other things I've been paid for in the past, enough of my current work is sufficiently mindless so I can listen to podcasts while doing it. I don't, as a matter of fact, believe in multi-tasking. I think it is mostly a poor idea. I think if you have the spare concentration to do a second thing simultaneously, that just means you aren't doing the first one as well as you can.

And indeed, I'm not really focusing on the podcasts most of the time. Instead I'm doing the paying work efficiently, and via the voices in my ear am sort of absorbing names and dates and a general feeling for the concepts; groundwork that I hope will make it easier to grasp those subjects when I actually have time to sit down to study them properly.

Lately I've been following a history of the world in multiple episodes. It jumps around by necessity; getting all the way to Marathon with the Persians before backtracking to cover the Greeks (all the way back to Minoans, actually, then up through the Greek dark ages and the flowering of Athens and through the wacky world of Sparta before rejoining our previous friends under the latest ruler, Xerxes.) And because of the peculiar way my mp3 player sorts files (I believe it is by file creation date; it certainly isn't in alpha-numeric) I'm listening to them out of order anyhow.

So hopping back and forth from 3,000 BC to 394 AD during the day, reading alternatively Bullfinch or Diamond during lunch break, and then leafing through blogs or reading the latest Samantha Sutton mystery over meals and the few shivering hours I spend at home waiting for the heat to start working so I can go to bed.

Military History

I was doing some random searching around for good descriptions on the working of a standard archaeological "unit" (usually a 1 meter by 1 meter pit), and came across a website for the Sand Hill site. Lots of history, good archaeology going on there to uncover the various cultures that passed through. And this dig is where? Fort Bragg.

And it took me several minutes and another web search to recapture memory of my own history. Yes, Fort Bragg. Where I'd spent three years of my life. Odd that I could come that close to forgetting the name.




I've been noticing anew, that even in this age a lot of history still ends up mired in the lists of battles and kings and generals. The coming and going of the Neo-Assyrian Empire is one page of trade routes and early Iron Age technological developments, and nine pages of battles against Nubians and Kushites and their final fall to Babylonians and Medes at Harran.

And I think I know one reason why. History is written, as they say, by the victors. But I don't mean that here in the sense John Harington meant when he said "Treason doth never prosper."* History is the reconstruction of the past through the writings of the past (as archaeology is the reconstruction of the past through the debris left behind). Oversimplified, sure. But who leaves written record? Why, pretty much the same people who wage wars.

Basically kings. Who have the funds to have stela carved, rock faces painted, troubadours hired, painters paid; and really good reasons to want their successes in wars to be prominently displayed (as well as preserved for posterity.)

Yeah, sure...a lot of the writing we find from the past is grocery bills, but those don't make as ready a story. Pulling a thrilling narrative out of the transition to three-field crop rotation is a lot more work. From the point of view of ruling nobility, who married who, who had a grudge against who, and especially who's chariots were tougher than who's is important. Important to the present (to keep conquered peoples cowed, your own taxpayers happily paying, and potential enemies cautious) and important to the future -- at least, the future of one's own line ("Before you think of invading here, remember what my dad did to your last army!") So we get stories. Big, blockbuster production stories full of blood and action. Which get entwined as well with myth, until you can't tell your Yĕshúʿa from your Joshua.

Heck, a variation of this pattern continues when we make the transition across the Industrial Revolution; when instead of a Clovis Point arising seemingly out of a culture as a whole, someone sticks their name in front of a Cotton Gin and has both the need and the funds to make sure people mention them together. Thus we shift just slightly sideways until the surface gloss of history is as much "And in 1856 Henry Bessemer.." as it is "In 720 BC, Sargon and Marduk-apla-iddina met in battle..."

History is also unwritten by the victors; from American Indian Boarding Schools to outright genocide, dominant cultures have worked to erase other languages, religions, cultures -- basically, to erase the losers from history itself. And more than one ancient ruler went around toppling statuary and defacing monuments to make sure that the only story that stuck in people's minds was their own.

This is why I gravitate more towards archaeology and anthropology. Because if you aren't looking primarily at the writing, you tend to organize more about the spread and evolution of cultural trends, the economics of trade, the science of cultivation...and less about which general won a fight on which day.




* "For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason."

The Good Shepard

I'm not excited about the new Star Wars movie. In fact, not even interested enough to challenge the weather and see it in a theater; I can wait for the DVD. But I've noticed an interesting split in impressions of it. Specifically, that many commenters at various of the blogs I follow have enthusiastically adopted it as "their" Star Wars movie -- because it offers a female character they can identify with.

Oddly enough, this character is one of the reasons I was disinclined to race out to see the movie. Or, rather, what I thought I was seeing in the advertising; another of those colorless and interchangeable faux action girls (to use the TVTropes term) that serve as the thin pretense of diversity for so many mass media products. Apparently this character is better than that, though; even much better. Even if this hard-bitten fighter is clearly (from the images I've seen) touching up her make-up between lightsabre duels.

Which is one of those odd details I've included in my own fanfic. My Lara Croft is careful to explain at one juncture just how much work and how many little jars "from the best Parisian suppliers" goes into maintaining that fresh-faced All Natural look.

And, yeah. The concept of identification. Having a female Jedi who doesn't serve as eye candy or hostage de jour or other peripheral role to the default male (white, straight) heroes. Why some game characters never speak, why others can be tailored in appearance, race, gender. Or species, depending on the game; apparently the choice of avatar is rather more complex than simply having one that looks just like you.

My Shep (Mass Effect) was female, and non-white. And when I remember that, I realize that most of my writing has also taken a distaff POV. First character I ever wrote extensively with was Laura Wilkinson. Who actually started as a secondary character in someone else's story, but even fourteen-year-old me couldn't stomach a blatant damsel in distress scenario and ended up recasting the whole thing from her point of view. And of course giving her a whole lot more agency.

My first attempt at a novel starred Kimberly Velaquez (who was a conscious stereotype, the hard-bitten female PI that was appearing with some frequency in detective fiction in I think the 1980's). The second was built around Mie Nakamura (who owed her origin to anime but quickly grew into the only appropriate character to tell a story of trying to do the right thing against increasing social pressure, both external and strongly internalized). And my current cross-over pic started with the intentions of giving Stargate SG1 equal billing but they have been largely overshadowed by the forthright personality of late classic era (aka Tomb Raider: Underworld) Lara Croft.

And, yeah, my attempt to write a new novel around a sound man for the "Elves with Guitars" (also a thing that was going around at least a couple decades ago...Emma Bull's The War for the Oaks probably the Ur-work here) may be foundering on my inability to properly mesh with a male protagonist. Now that's food for thought. (Adding to the problem, I originally cast Brendan Marshall to be as Standard Model Hollywood Hero as possible, aka the "normal guy" who is more average than any real human being is capable of. The more I try to go more interesting with his character, though, the more I can't seem to figure out just where I'm going with it all).

Somewhat like this essay.

Sutton Who?

Sigh. Worked a half-day Saturday, had a much-needed sleep-in on Sunday. Result is only a few hours to work on anything.

I put a coat of primer on the first attempt at an Imperial Highway part and the grooves between the stones look horrible. So I've coated the whole thing in Bondo Spot Putty and will sand and "point" from there. I was thinking about Spot Putty anyhow to add some texture. Hammered finish spray might also provide a little texture, but I've discovered those finishes are a lot more visual than they are textural.

If this works the way I hope I might have the model ready for casting by the weekend. At which point I'm off work and won't be able to do all that smelly pouring of silicone et al at work instead of in my tiny kitchen. Oh, and TechShop managed to fix their vacuum-former, apparently. Well, at the worst-case deliverable I can cast during the week I return to work.



Not enough concentration for electronics, sigh. Or the vastly overdue Holocron project I promised (related, as I still want to work up a custom LED board for that).

Reading the second Samantha Sutton novel now, but I'm a little worried. The third came out just last month, but I've yet to find a single online bookstore that has it in stock, or has any information about when it may be available, or even makes it possible to set a "back in stock" alert or pre-sale or anything. I'm talking every store -- I've hit over a dozen now, and each has the same uninformative blank of "No, don't have it, don't know when we'll have it, can't tell you anything else." Makes me wonder if there's something going on.



While I'm ranting, two annoying "improvements" to the Mac OS I'm using now. The nag box that shows up if you remove a thumb drive doesn't auto-select anymore, forcing you to scroll over to it, highlight it, then hit the very small checkbox to close it. Someone obviously had done their reading on Fitt's Law; the entire operation is carefully tailored for maximum inefficiency in aid of punishing the user for not waiting whatever arbitrary interval the Mac might desire to properly unmount a hot-swappable device. (One thing I have to give Windows; it at least gives you a pop-up for "It is now safe to remove your device." Mac does not give any such clear indication.)

The other is oddly similar but appears in the bundled Mail client; it now is necessary to both select and to fully expose in the window each and every message before the "unread" flag will clear. So if you are sent a typical work-related email with a dozen independent replies and forwards from different people, instead of scrolling swiftly through the stack of replies you have to pretend to read every damn one if you want to be able to use the "unread" flag as a signal that you have new messages waiting.

Mostly, though, I live in fear of when I'll be forced to make the next upgrade. Because from everything I've read the next one breaks practically everything. And Mac OS doesn't exactly have a reputation for giving either enhanced performance or increased efficiency with each upgrade. All they offer, really, is more glossy, the latest fad that they insist you adapt to (which even if it might save a keystroke or two -- which it rarely does -- that saving is easily lost in the time spent re-learning), and some trivial bit of code functionality the lazy designer of some ap it turns out I really need decided was better than writing their own algorithms for, and thus...forces me to upgrade.

And that last sentence needs to be burnt to the ground. Good thing I'm also stalled out on writing my fanfic, then!

Dust

Never been on the playa. But the playa is on me now. I've been tearing down some speakers that were loaned out to the last Burning Man, and I've gotten more familiar than I want to be with that super-fine, abrasive, and surprisingly desiccant dust. My hands still feel dry after just brushing the stuff out of electronics for a few hours.

Delivery date for Imperial Highway has been moved back. Might even be time to experiment with laser-engraving detail (the basswood model is coming along, but I am concerned about how clean details like the seams between stones are going to be).

I'm still going slow. Three months ago, it was too hot to concentrate after I got off work. Now, it is too cold to want to do anything but wrap up in a quilt and try to get the baseboard heater to do something other than make the air go all dry. But then, last week I worked on the new prop, mixed a show, and built more of my LED stage marker lights for the same guy that talked me into building the first one. However: the last two really cut into my sleeping hours, and catching up during the weekend pretty much nixed me getting anything done then. Got a week off coming up, though. Maybe I'll get something built then.

Followed some random links and discovered an odd relative of Poe's Law. I watched two hilarious parody trailers for a "A Wrinkle in Time" movie (the Madeline L'Engle children's classic), and then a third...which may have been an actual trailer for an actual movie. Because the kind of company that would make a movie of this odd, slightly orthogonal, but also terribly life affirming and blatantly Christian (in a quite non-denominational way) and also Newbery Award winning fantasy is going to pour on the Disneyfictation and emphasize the fantasy adventure and the wish fulfillment "power of love" stuff and make the Christian subtext even more blatant and a lot less sub...which all ends up in an overblown, Hallmark glossy, "In a World" trailer that it is so perfectly a self-parody it becomes impossible to sort from the real thing.

Also on the parody side... I'm 20 Kindle pages in on the first one and I'm already totally hooked on the Samantha Sutton stories. These are far enough on the side of real archaeology that a not-so-veiled reference to the Tomb Raider games is being played by the protagonist's annoying brother. 

Not that Lara Croft nor Daniel Jackson were ever exemplars of the working archaeologist (who is probably doing CRM in any case, there being little funding for full excavations these days). And I've already underlined this in my fanfiction. In fact, I've been tempted to go a little further. It might be an interesting direction to take Daniel Jackson; the universe has been just a little too agreeable, in that every old legend he investigates turns out to be true, and even more, every theory he comes up with turns out to be right.

So I could have him fall too far into woo, falling for all the Pakal's Spaceship nonsense. Or since the plots in the show usually involve the existing back-story he could start seeing Goa'uld and Stargates where there weren't any. 

(Really, this exposes even more how stupid that universe became by the time the series ended. They discover that all the major figures of the Arthurian mythos -- Merlin, Morgan le Fay, et all -- are Ancients. Err, what? What is encountered in the show are practically the modern Cliff Notes versions of the characters of Malory, who descend from Geoffrey of Monmouth's, and we know he was drawing from Welsh and Breton sources -- among others -- but you think that we're going to see Mynyddog Mwynfawr show up during Season Nine? It's not just that there are Ancient Astronauts, it's that the Secret History is also the Theme Park version of history; nobody that you didn't hear about in High School.)

Well, that might be an interesting direction to take Daniel, but I'm in need of something stronger. I made an error over the last couple chapters. I closed off the main internal conflicts. It has been convincingly argued (by who?) that internal conflict is as necessary as external conflict, and powerful writing can ensue when the two support each other. Except I've already brought Lara to a place where she can launch into the events of the third Crystal Dynamics game (Underworld). I don't have a convenient catharsis for her before the conclusion of my story.

And the SG1 crowd -- taken as they are from an open-ended multi-season television show with a stable core cast -- don't have available major emotional arcs I can tap into. Sure, I could break into their characters and take them on journeys the television show didn't. I don't mind going a little OOC, or even a lot OOC (Out Of Character, a frequent phrase in critiques of fan fiction).

But there's nothing obvious right now. So I'm reading up on Gilgamesh and Sargon of Akkad and Geothermal power generation and Decade Volcanos and Lemuria...and hopefully at some point an idea or two about some nice emotional conflicts will occur to go along with the external grapple-line swinging, pit trap escaping, and gun shooting.