Imperial Highway III

The sign is, alas, gone now.

In any case, the Imperial Highway project is turning into my big exercise in learning how to achieve clean casts. I've made about two dozen casts now, and they continue to have problems. Air bubbles, holes, overflow...and then there's my experiments with dying the Smooth-Cast 300 with something other than the pigments the manufacturer recommends (because I don't have time to order those and have them shipped).

The side pieces are being done in a two-piece box mold, made the classic way; lay up one side with clay, pour, flip and remove the clay, spray thoroughly with mold release, and pour again. I didn't remember to add pour spouts when I was laying up the clay, but that didn't matter so much; I needed to cut over a dozen vent holes (and I'm still getting trapped air in the cast).

The top deck is a one-piece mold, and in that one, the main issue is that if I don't have the mold perfectly level, and pour to exactly the right depth, the final piece doesn't have the right (or even consistent) thickness. I took the skin off my thumb trying to sand these pieces flat.

So I've been repairing with auto putty (not Bondo, but the nead-able two-part stuff) sanding and trimming, and gluing in the super-magnets that hold the final assemblies together strong enough to support lead miniatures for table-top play but that allow them to be packed flat for slightly better transportability.

As additives, Pelican black ink appears to be working. As long as I mix it into the B part of the casting compound. Or was it the A part? The primer, on the other hand, didn't adhere properly and I spent a nice hour removing that with acetone. There goes my illusion that I could assembly-line cast and paint all of them on Saturday, and have time Sunday to start cutting out the access ramp (which, assuming I get that far, will be done in a shell mold).

I picked up several cans of Tamiya model spray (I've had good results with it in the past), Model Master colors for the stonework and detailing (which I will probably add to with my old college set of acrylics), and some cheap brushes to stick in the enamels. There's also a little blood on them as well (see above re my injured thumb).

Ah, if only TechShop was more convenient. I'm tempted to move messy projects like this out to my work space, but I'm still waiting for things to firm up a little around there before I start asking favors.

Raider of Blue Highways

I think I've found a direction to go in that fanfic I keep talking about.

I'm not either clever enough or patient enough to come up with a new mythology of the Stargate universe that is consistent with what was shown on screen but also isn't insulting to the real worlds of history and archaeology (physics will have to fend for itself). I'm also unwilling to go too far off canon.

But even as I risk turning the story polemical as I trot out straw dogs (assuming straw dogs trot), I think it may work to bring in some of the large body of Ancient Astronaut and associated theories and treat them as the hogwash they are.

In fact, I'm looking now at doing a bit of a Foucalt's Pendulum trick (always steal from the best). Lara plays along with the treasure-hunting team of "L. Lytton Peabody" in a barely-legal exploration of something a lot like Watson Brake; earthen mound systems built by early indigenous cultures of North America. Peabody has lots of theories about Vikings and Lost Tribes of Israel and the usual roster of "Anyone but Native Americans" of the alternative history crowd, and perhaps due to his tireless self-publicity or perhaps his far-right political connections he's at least attracted half an eye of attention from the NID.

He may not know who the girl with the charming accent he found at a local diner is, but the NID does, and they have a task for an adventurer-archaeologist. Possibly (probably?) off-world.

I don't know yet why she is in Mississippi or Louisiana (prime Mound Builder sites) but I have been looking at Lafcaido Hearn, who before Kwaiden was writing about (and living in) New Orleans, and was friends with a particular famous practitioner of voudon.

So at least I get to write about something I have some interest in and information thereof. Unfortunately, although I'd love to do more with the fish-out-of-water of our British peer and heiress slumming in truck-stop towns in Middle America, my personal memories of traveling the same blue highways are out of date even for the period I'm setting the fanfiction in.



And this doesn't get me much closer to the next chapter, as even if I don't start (as I really want to) in media res, I want to cut away from Lara Croft and let the SG1 crowd struggle along alone for a while. Obviously, there's a briefing room scene to be had where Daniel can pontificate about Akhenaten (and Djoser, and Imhotep, and so on). And I'm willing to give him the credit to be re-thinking his own "Pyramids were built by aliens thousands of years earlier than anyone thinks" ideas.

But that's not where I'm going, as much as the Valley of Kings or pretty much any part of ancient Egypt is attractive. So I sort of need to get him out to Abingdon where Lara's aides and name-drop Atlantis on him and send him off on a largely-mistaken tangent.

Of course in-universe Daniel does eventually discover Atlantis. Yeah, that's Stargate for you. But that doesn't mean that Blavatsky was right or that Mu exists or that Atlantis ever fought the Athenian Republic...  So there's plenty of room for Daniel to actually get something wrong for a change. As long as I can manage to gather everyone together at Mount Shasta to play with a merely-dormant volcano and some inconvenient ancient technology while the very-real Norse Frost Giants attack...

The Man Who Went to Earth

I found another task at work it is easy to lose oneself in. We have a half-dozen high-tech coffee vending machines (the kind that grind the coffee for each cup they brew). Those require nearly constant maintenance. For one thing, they go through 3-4 pounds of coffee per machine every day. Plus they dispense hot chocolate and creamer and a weird powdered vanilla-cappuccino mix which is better than you'd think it would be.

Keeping the company caffeinated takes 4-6 person-hours every day, which are being shared between our shop of three or four people. Actually, over the past week it has been mostly me, as I was carrying the only working key (due to being the person willing to make the run out to Rex and help them figure out how to duplicate it).

It is oddly interesting (and doesn't feel the least bit degrading) pulling apart the guts of these mechanisms to clean and adjust them. I'm pretty sure it would pall in a couple months but I found the day passed quickly while I was doing it. And not like I wasn't a prep cook and dishwasher once. As I said before, even as a sound designer you end up rolling cables and sweeping up. All jobs, when you get down to it, have their drudge component.

On the other hand I've been feeling quite poorly the last few days and the most I've accomplished on the Imperial Highway is multiple errands for additional casting compound, paints, magnets, and so forth. Figure I've spent at least a couple hundred on supplies but I haven't been counting.

Appears my fears about full-time work are still being born out. I've gone from "struggling" to "barely managing." About the best I can say is I can now pay my bills on time.

Sigh. I remember being in Boston a decade of winters ago. Skipping lunch to save money. Walking to work in the punishing cold rather than spend even the 75-cent bus fare. And here I am...still unwilling to spend on a new pair of shoes (a tube of Shoe Goo is cheaper). I was conscious of the ticking clock then, far too conscious. And now I'm a decade closer to a retirement I doubt I can afford.

Pigeon Chess

I'm still stalled on my Tomb Raider/SG1 cross-over fanfic, and apologies to all, but I'm going to try to work through some of my issues here. So ignore this post if you have no interest in an unfortunate collision between honest science and an honest adherence to the established canon of a fictional universe.

I Miss Theater

Five months now at the first full-time job I've had since the early 90's. Still not quite settled into the routine.

I miss theater schedules. Not so much the late nights -- I miss working in a scene shop equally, and that's basically a day job as far as hours. My major client of previous years I usually served with six hour shifts without lunch break, followed by 10 hours on the weekend (with a short dinner break). And then two or three days off. Meant you got a lot of your 40 hours over with in one bundle, and then had several consecutive days off to pursue personal projects (or just to recuperate).

More than that part of it, though, I miss the cycle of crunch and ease. Even a scene shop located miles from the theater feels the show cycle; the early days of anticipation as the first drawings begin drifting in, the solid weeks of constructing the bread-and-butter, then overtime hours and weekends as the show gets closer to load in, tech, and opening. Then time off for everyone, followed by a relaxed week or two of infrastructure maintenance; cleaning the shop, re-ordering supplies, doing odd tasks for the Box Office and so on.

We do have big orders which come in to the factory I'm at now, and we do have times when the orders are piling up. But there's not the same feeling of a goal to push towards, climb the peak of, then relax a little after.

I also miss the kind of work. I sort of gave up scene shop work because it tends towards the physically grueling. Access is limited in theaters, the tool set is small, and urgency is everything; this all means a lot of the process relies on brute muscle power. And not a little of it takes place in cramped conditions, and/or in the dark. So you sweat a lot, and your clothes (and limbs) get scratched and torn quite quickly.

Lighting also is a lot of hefting heavy and awkward loads with sheer brute force up precarious ladders and is even more likely in the dark. Add to this the ever-present dangers of shock and burns.

But the lovely part of theater is the sheer variety. I have a lot of odd little skills, and theater touches upon most of them. It also almost always requires you to invent something new. So there is a lot of brainstorming and on-the-fly problem solving. As well as every now and then quiet contemplative sessions with a calculator and a blank sheet of paper trying to figure out how to pull off a particular effect.

What I'm doing now is mostly less interesting. Leave it at that. Enough carpentry to keep my hand in, enough variety to not be completely bored, and some of the tasks are wonderfully zen-like and let me drift off following archaeology podcasts on my headphones while I work away. But it ain't like building scenery, or building a sound cue.

And there's the most essential part. We make precision equipment at this my employment for five months. It is used in theater -- or more precisely, in live venues. But it isn't the same as putting up a show. There's a lot of scutwork in any job, and theater is no exception, but when I sweep up a floor at a theater I feel I am contributing to the audience's experience when that show finally opens. And when I'm actually building or hanging or writing, I am creating a jeweled crown, the facade of an Egyptian temple, the light that filters through the bare winter branches or the sound of insects and frogs in a swamp.

Creating a jig for an engineer, as interesting as it can be, is not the same.

Dancing about Architecture: Arkham City (GOTY)

This is the second game in the "Arkham" series, released in 2011. Primarily, you play Batman in third person, swooping around the scenery, solving relatively simple puzzles, and getting in a whole bunch of fights. The Game of the Year addition collects most of the DLC in one place, unlocking several other playable characters; Catwoman becomes part of the main storyline in this addition, providing a prologue and a couple of later episodes.

And, yes, the fights are amusing. And you have a lot of "marvelous toys" to play with -- batarangs and smoke bombs and so forth (no Batmobile in this one) -- but really the high point of the game is swooping around the city, gliding silently into alleys or grappling-line upwards to perch on a gargoyle.

And what a city. The back-story to the game is that Gotham City, failing to keep their increasing crowd of colorful, powerful, and generally psychotic baddies behind the bars of any traditional prison or inane asylum, has chosen to wall off part of their equivalent of Manhattan Isle and let the crazies run loose (and hopefully, one gathers, kill each other off.)

So basically it's Escape from New York, only without Snake Plisken. Okay, ridiculous idea from any kind of legal basis, penologically, financially, or even practically. I mean, really -- if Hannibal Lector style restraints can't keep a character like the Joker down, how does a high wall and some guards with guns do it?

And what is this supposed bit of low-value real-estate? One that has police headquarters (well, the cop shop is often in some part of town no-one else wants), a decaying amusement park/district (shades of Coney Island), some waterfront, a nice old theater, the courthouse where the premier District Attorney of Gotham tried some of his famous cases, a massive natural history museum, a lovely sprawling subway entrance/mall in Crystal Palace style art nouveau...

So, really, the old part of town, the one-time center before the outside investors moved in and the big financial buildings and multinational headquarters moved in. Central Boston with the old State House. Old Philly. "The City" in London. Basically, the kind of historic district even a financially desperate metropolis would be loathe to lose.

Older buildings, brownstone and brick, tall narrow windows, heavy cornices and plenty of gargoyles. Some massive statuary, too, but not taken to the extremes of the Tim Burton films. And it is all littered, half-abandoned, some boarded up, lots rusted...and add to this barricades and other modifications made in the course of the ongoing gang wars.

Several of the major figures in Batman's rogue's gallery have set up little empires and they are waging a violent turf war. But this, too, as atmospheric as it is, begs all sorts of questions. Are any of these characters, from Two-Face down to the Penguin, going to let someone else set the rules? Let outside society set the rules? Hell with entertaining their captors with a self-imposed cage match, these are the kinds of people who would team up to break out. And maybe the game designers did mean for this to come across as lobsters trying to escape a pot by climbing over each other, but it doesn't read that way in game. It reads as if many of these major figures in Batman's history are content to play king of an artificially constricted hill.

Oh, and when you leave the rainy rooftops and perch-handy cornices you discover the street layout makes no sense at all. Blind alleys, meandering streets...even the barricades and the giant wall and the broken bit of freeway (very Oakland post Loma Prieta) aren't enough to make the street layout rational. In fact, once you've been down to street level a few times, a lot of the allure of the setting wears off; you realize that these are mostly empty facades and for all the seeming size and variety of the place there's really nothing more you are going to see.



So the basic plot works out as a whole set of fetch quests/boss battles. You end up visiting the same sites multiple times, as you go across town to get something (and fight the owner for it) then back to try to deliver it (and fight against the not-unexpected betrayal by the person you fetched it for.)

Like Snake, Batman is early on cursed with one of those medical conditions with a handy countdown timer, and is working as much as anything else to save his own life. The details, of course, make no sense biologically. Basically, the Joker took Titan Serum in the last game, and the side effects are poisoning him -- he hasn't long to live. So he injects Batman with his tainted blood, which gives Batman (despite his larger, more robust physique) exactly as long to live. And to rub it in, Joker makes anonymous donations to the blood supply of several of Gotham's hospitals, putting upwards of thirty thousand patients in the same dire straights.

These people never met Paracelsus. This is practically homeopathic (except that the weaker dose is exactly, down to the minute, as efficacious as the stronger.) Indeed, Batman gets a temporary cure from Ra's al Gul (partially answering how he can be fighting and grapple-swinging like he is if he is supposed to be a few minutes from croaking) but at the climax the Joker -- an un-athletic bantam-weight with a pre-existing medical condition -- very nearly out-survives him.

Which leads us to one of the odder moments; at the conclusion of the main story-line a sombre Batman carries the dead body of the Joker out and lays him almost reverentially on the hood of a police car. This sequence is so much "elegy for the honored dead" it's amazing they resisted the urge to stage a Pieta pose as part of it. I guess we sort of forgot Batman's one-time lover Talia, Ra's al Gul himself, a number of slain cops and medical people, and several thousand dead crooks thanks to Protocol Ten. Plus any number of living but brutalized people Batman personally delivered concussions, compound fractures, and a strong need for reconstructive surgery to during the course of the game.



Fighting is both simple and deep. A very nice touch is that it is (barely) possible to complete the game doing nothing but button-mashing. The novice is not penalized by not being able to see through to the end, instead, what rewards the expert player is better action, more balletic moves and more interesting options. Batman can fight very well if you have the skill to bring it out, and that is its own reward. The game's answer to heath is simple; you don't gain back any health during a fight, but you get it all back as soon as the field is cleared. This means you have to be relatively careful to counter blows and use stealth around well-armed opponents, because you can't just duck around a corner to recoup or drink a handy Bat-potion to heal up.

One downside to unlocking Catwoman as a playable character is that she is so much quicker. After fighting with her, Batman feels like a muscle-bound tank. And after watching Selina's slinky walk, he sort of looks like he is in need of a Bat-Laxative.

On the other hand, he does have the grapple gun, and a cape to glide on, and a lot of gadgets. In the mode of many modern games, several of the gadgets are necessary to move in certain special places; sometimes you need to make a hole with explosive gel in order to proceed, for instance. Or there is the only thing that stumped me enough to look for help online; to cross an underground river you toss a freeze grenade to make a temporary ice-floe which you can perch on.

There are both elite mooks and boss battles, with the most difficult fights being those that combine both. All of the above require special techniques to take down; you can't just hit them. The most difficult pure boss battle in this sense is Mister Freeze, who needs to be stunned before you can approach him and do damage. And he learns from each encounter; if you manage to stun him for a moment by activating one of the handy electromagnets just standing around the room (just go with it), on recovery he methodically freezes the rest of them, ensuring they can no longer be used against him.

The game is decent about informing you what you need to do. The two strongest errors here are ones I've seen before; first is an inability to name anything either properly or even consistently; you simply have to figure out that "Control Room" and "Monitor Bay" both refer to the same thing, and both of those mean the place that looked like a receptionist's desk. The second is more annoying; it is the way the game will prompt you insistently about the wrong part of the problem. Aka "I need to get to the Control Room," the Batman mutters to himself. "The other key must be in the Control Room. The clue to this mystery is in the Control Room." Yeah, I got that the "Control Room" is where I'm supposed to be, game -- my problem is figuring out which damned room you intended that to be!



Estimate for completing the main campaign is a mere twenty-five hours for the average player. Other campaign material adds another ten hours or so. Then there's the usual garbage of collectables; various "Riddler Puzzles" which you basically solve for raw points. Really, the major replay is to hone your combat and try to get higher combo scores, as well as trying out more inventive fighting methods.

And maybe fly around the city a bit, stopping on a gargoyle or two to brood in the rain. Because isn't that what you came to the game for in the first place?

Ooh, Mu

I finally poured the first mold for the Imperial Highway. Didn't take any pictures -- there's thousands of pictures of people's two-part molds out there already. I still have no idea how well it will cast up. I suspect it will be rather thick. Alternate plan is to cast Hydrocal and try pulling sheet styrene over it with TechShop's vacuum former.

The weather is (temporarily) warming, if wet, and I have (sort of) heat in the apartment now. Between that and moving the start of my day an hour later, I seem to be doing a little better. Still was a bit of a push to pour two sides of a two-part mold in one evening after work.



The Tomb Raider story is stalled. I recently read an extremely entertaining loosely-linked set of Tomb Raider fanfics which bring a lot more real-world history and religion in, with a decidedly European sensibility, and also placed a bit more realistically in some of the (many) real-world trouble spots. And I'm humbled. For all that I'm cramming on history right now (mostly ancient world) I am not and will never be one of those people who can extemporize at length about hoplite formations or the political use of ostracism in classical Athens.

Of course this is a road that can be followed too far. No-one "reads" Umberto Eco...they struggle through him with a terrible awareness they are missing half of the references and allusions. And I'd rather not be one of that kind of writer, either. I'd prefer a shared illusion; the reader thinks I know something about the Great Siege of Malta, and after reading my story they feel that they, too, have learned something about that test run to what would the last great sea battles between galleys as the Ottoman Empire clashed with a variegated and oft-feuding coalition of nominally Christian nations for control of the Mediterranean.

And, yeah, as much as I've been trying to learn something about Assyrians, Babylonians, Hittites and Kushites and early Judea and of course mighty (but often fractured) Egypt, I think I'm just as likely to be focusing the final chapters of the fic on more recent history; specifically, the tattered and contradictory set of tales told of Atlantis, Lemuria and Mu.

Oh, yes, but once you start looking into them, you realize the wealth of imagination that has crufted around those words arose from many threads going in all directions. It isn't all just Plato. You dig at all and you are looking at Blavatsky and the Theosophists, and relative late-comers like Von Daniken who synthesize that with concepts Howard Phillips Lovecraft and his friends were selling for a nickel a word, and characters like Augustus le Plongeon or Ettiene Brassard, and before you know it you've got links to Young-Earth Creationists, Zorastorianism, and once again our old buddy Hermes Trismagestis.

Which is exactly what I was talking about above. Name-drop the Dialogues, and a little Solon of Athens, on the way to Atlantis and that's fine. But start talking about Ignatious Donnely or worse yet, Francisco López de Gómara, and you are rapidly approaching the point where your reader gives up in befuddlement.

(A note. I spend way too long when I write fiction, so when I blog I don't generally bother with spell-check on any of the names I drop).



I'm working a day job now, and it is only tangentially involved with sound. But lest you feel (as I'm starting to feel) as if this blog will never be about theatrical sound again, I do have a couple shows coming up in this new year.