Marie Brennan's Blog, page 148

A Year in Pictures – Monumental Altar

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There’s a very distinct style of decoration to be found in major Polish churches, and that style is HUGE. Also GOLD. The various chapel altars, etc. we saw there pretty much all looked like this: massive gilt structures that look like they’ll stand until the Second Coming. They certainly make for an impressive sight.

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The devil you know

I’ve noticed two quakes since I moved to California in 2008. One of them was small and brief: it felt like when you’re on the highway and a larger vehicle goes by quickly, so that the wind of its passing makes your car sway momentarily to the side.

The other was last night.

I was trying to fall asleep when it hit. Took me a second or two to figure out that yes, this really was an earthquake. Then it kept going, while my husband woke up and we stared at one another, trying to figure out if we ought to run for a doorway or something. It was strong enough to worry me, not strong enough to be really scary: 6.1, with an epicenter near Napa, maybe fifty-five miles from here. For the people there, it was worse, with injuries and property damage.

I looked up the epicenter and magnitude immediately, because it was better to know than to lie awake wondering. Of course, knowing brings its own perils. That’s a 6.1 at X distance: okay. What would it feel like if it were a 6.1 in, say, Hayward, just across the Bay? Or on the San Andreas Fault, right here on the Peninsula? Actually, that one sounds scarier than it actually is; the San Andreas is more of a problem for SoCal than it is in the Bay. The Hayward Fault is the one we need to be afraid of. What if it were 7.1? The scale is logarithmic; 7.1 is not one-sixth bigger than 6.1. It’s ten times bigger. What if it were 8.1?

Not good thoughts, when you’re trying to get to sleep.

Nothing is damaged here, though Napa wasn’t as lucky. I find myself hoping that the suffering and loss of people there has a silver lining, helping motivate the local and state governments to move forward on some earthquake preparedness measures. We’re already refitting the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct, though last time I checked that isn’t due to be finished until 2016; since the aqueduct supplies most of the Bay Area’s drinking water and (pre-refit) could be thoroughly trashed by a big one on the Hayward Fault, that’s a pretty high priority. But there are other things we could be doing, and should. Sure, it’ll cost money. But we’ll lose even more when the East Bay falls down.

In the meanwhile, at least I know what a “proper” earthquake feels like. It’s good to know that, in a way: now I have facts, instead of just imagination.

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tonight’s random train of thought

Faffing around, putting off actually getting started again on work like I should, browsing the web, come across a mention of Wendy and Richard Pini, spend a moment imagining what I would say to them if I met them.

Remember that way back in the day, I bought the Elfquest RPG and made a bunch of characters, but never actually played the game; just sat around making up stories that more or less amounted to OC fanfic.

Probably a good thing we never actually played it. I think the game was Chaosium, and I don’t recall the system being really all that well-suited to the setting — not that I would have known the difference at the time.

Hmmm. What would be a good system for running an Elfquest game?

. . . no, I’m not actually planning on running such a thing. File this under “fun things to fiddle with,” like my hack of Cinematic Unisystem for Harry Potter or Mage: The Awakening for the Wheel of Time. (Or, um, Pathfinder for Dragon Age. Except I actually ran that one for a while.) But I open the floor to suggestions: what would you use for Elfquest? I personally have no idea, but I’m curious what other people might suggest.

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A Year in Pictures – Ephesus Arch

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At Ephesus, the remnants aren’t properly put into position until the archaeologists are sure they have them arranged correctly. I don’t know whether this is an actual reconstruction of a bit of building, or whether they just stacked up what they’ve got until they can deal with it properly — but either way, the tree with its flowers made a nice backdrop.

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I want my body back.

I’m at the stage of surgical recovery now where the thought that keeps going through my head is, “I want my body back.”

When I take off the boot to let my skin get some fresh air, my ankle is still swollen, still discolored from the skin irritation, and scarred. It doesn’t look like my ankle; it looks like somebody else’s. In the early days of recovery, taking the boot off was scary, because I need to keep my foot in a flexed position and the post-surgical weakness made me afraid that I would accidentally move it too far. Now? I’m not afraid at all, because I couldn’t move my foot too far if you paid me. With every passing day, it stiffens up more, my ankle petrifying into a single position. At this point I’d feel pain from the muscles before I felt it from the repaired ligament. By the time I get to physical therapy, I’ll have nearly no range of motion at all.

I recognize that in the grand scheme of things, it could be far worse. I’m young enough, and the surgery was minor enough, that I expect to recover fully. I could be stuck with the sort of injury you never get over, the kind where you have to learn to live with the body you’ve got now, rather than hoping to regain the one you had before. But it’s still alienating. And I have cabin fever, not only for my house in general and my living room in specific, but for my own physical existence: my body isn’t moving very well, so I’ve got this increasing and pointless desire to somehow crawl out of it for a little while and go running around in the sunshine.

Clearly, I need to learn astral projection.

Fortunately, I’m near — well, not so much the end as a turning point. Unless something has gone horribly wrong, I’ll be out of the boot next week. Which won’t magically transform my ankle into its old self, but will mean I can do something other than just sitting around being patient. I made some physical therapy appointments yesterday. I’ll be able to walk without my legs functionally being two different lengths. I’ll put on jeans for the first time in a month. All of these are Good Things.

In the meanwhile, I sit here and keep thinking, “I want my body back.”

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A Year in Pictures – Pulgas Water Temple

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Near where I live, the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct (which supplies fresh water to the San Francisco Bay Area) terminates at the Pulgas Water Temple, a random little decorative site. The road leading to it is closed off on Sundays for people to bike or walk through the area, and my family went there for an afternoon; I thought I had lost the pictures from that jaunt, but recently recovered them.

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HabitRPG: gamification works, yo

“Gamification” is a bit of a buzz-word these days: the idea that, hey, games are a really great psychological tool (challenge, risk, reward), so what if we harnessed their behavioral-modification powers for good?

HabitRPG is built around precisely that idea. And I’ll tell you up front: the rest of this post is me raving about how useful it’s been for me, so if you don’t want to read something that sounds like an enthusiastic infomercial, you can just skip this post.

The basic notion is that you can earn gold and XP and treasure by doing stuff in your daily life. The game divides these into habits (either positive or negative, i.e. things you want to encourage or discourage yourself from doing regularly), dailies (things you intend to do on a set schedule, either every day or on certain days of the week), and to-dos (one-off items). If you indulge in a bad habit or fail to complete a daily, you take damage to your Hit Points, but completing things lets you level up, which improves your stats, as does the gear you buy. It also gives you a chance to find eggs, hatching potions, or food; these are used to hatch pets, and feeding a pet can turn it into a mount for you to ride.

Your stats matter because you can form parties with other people on HabitRPG and go on quests; these take the form either of collection quests, where you have a chance of finding a specific object every time you complete a task, or boss fights, where you inflict damage by completing dailies and to-dos. The latter gives you more incentive to finish your tasks, because if you miss a daily, not only do you get hurt, but the rest of your party also takes damage from the boss. Add in a small chat-room function, and you’ve got the basics of social networking to help keep you engaged and playing.

I will not pretend this works for everybody. But for me? HECK YES. Oh my god. Early on, I would find myself doing things like taking out the recycling before the bag was overflowing, because if I was very productive today I might be able to buy an upgrade to my gear! These days I’ve bought all the gear for my character class (at higher levels you get to pick a class and obtain skills that can help you or your party), but I still motivate myself to complete all my dailies by remembering that if I miss one, I lose the buff to my stats that comes from getting everything done. I’ve made attempts in the past to keep a to-do list, but never managed it for longer than a short period of time; having it online (there’s a mobile app as well as the web interface) helps, but linking it to rewards helps even more. Recently I’ve found myself hunting for things I can easily complete because dang it, I am so close to getting the Beastmaster achievement (hatching all the basic pets), but I haven’t been getting enough zombie hatching potion drops.

Press bar, get pellet! Dance, little lab rat, dance!

The major flaw in it so far — apart from the mobile app, which is only slowly acquiring full functionality — is that once you’re a certain distance in, some of the motivating aspects lose force. I worked hard to earn enough gold for all my gear, but once I had that, gold became pretty useless. There’s a solution to that, which is that you can design your own custom rewards and set a price on them; the difficult part is figuring out what rewards will be effective for you. I don’t, for example, want to make “read for an hour” a reward, because it would be detrimental to my life and career if I positioned that as a special treat I have to earn, rather than a routine part of my existence. My best idea so far is actually “flake out”: I can, for fifty gold, buy the right to skip a daily without taking damage for having done so. Because sometimes you need a break, and this is one I earn by not skipping things all the time.

HabitRPG includes a subscriber option, where you can toss five bucks their way each month to help support the service. This gives you the ability to buy gems with your gold (though there’s a monthly cap on that), and the gems can purchase other things, like treasure or character customization. I think I’d been playing for less than a month when I subscribed. Am I getting five dollars a month’s worth of benefit from this?

Heck yes.

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A Year in Pictures – Malbork Medallion

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If this had still been intact and in situ wherever it belongs at Malbork Castle, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second look. But chipped and skewered on iron rods in a side courtyard? It suddenly became much more photogenic.

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A Year in Pictures – SPACE TURTLES!!!

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It’s rare for me to do heavy editing on my photos. I crop them a bit, straighten them out, enhance the colors until they look like I remember them being in real life.

But on this occasion, I feel obliged to share with you all the original form of the photo:

I loved the carving in the ground, but the light made it absolutely impossible to get an overhead shot (which would show the turtles properly) without my shadow ending up on it, too. But with some heavy cropping and manipulation of the colors, I was able to properly convey the awesomeness of what really looks like a pair of turtles with jet engines in their butts zooming around together in in the depths of space!

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A Year in Pictures – Eighteenth-Century Graffiti

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If memory serves, this is a set of boards taken from the wall of an eighteenth-century prison. I have to say: the quality of graffiti has declined remarkably over the last two centuries . . . .

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