Marie Brennan's Blog, page 161

A Year in Pictures – Notre-Dame Across the Seine

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I got several good photos of Notre Dame the night we wandered around staying up way too late — well, as good as I could get with an old Leica and no tripod — but the framing of this one is hands-down my favorite. Finding a suitable gap between the wooden kiosks that line the bank of the Seine wasn’t easy, though!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/646640.html. Comment here or there.

A Year in Pictures – Round Table

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I have no idea why there’s a building named for King Arthur in Gdańsk. Artus Court was apparently a big social center for merchants back in the city’s medieval and Renaissance heyday; nowadays it’s a museum, and one of the upstairs rooms is dedicated to vaguely Arthurian stuff (read: weapons, armor, and tents a la a medieval tournament), complete with this Round Table. (With, um, a Tudor rose in the middle. Go figure.)

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/646274.html. Comment here or there.

A Year in Pictures – House of the Vestals

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Sadly, I have no pictures that are particularly well-suited to Cinco de Mayo. Instead, here’s one from the House of the Vestals in the Roman Forum. Very little remains of the structure or its statues, but the flowers, I think, make up for it.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/645926.html. Comment here or there.

A funny thing happened during Mary’s reading . . .

The Book Bin in Salem, OR (where today’s event was held) has a lovely orange tabby cat named Rose Weasley. Naturally I made her acquaintance when I arrived, both while I was still in street clothes, and then again after getting into costume.

I did my bit — reading, passing around “dragon bones” — and then Mary got up to read. About two thirds of the way through her piece, Rose comes wandering by my chair. I offer her a few discreet pats, not wanting to distract anybody from Mary’s reading, and Rose sniffs inquisitively at the skirt and train of my dress. And then she decides to investigate this fascinating new cave she found.

Which is to say, she wanders under my skirts.

I’m sitting there attempting to keep a straight face — remember, Mary’s still reading; she doesn’t need me making a spectacle of myself behind her — while these odd little tugging sensations ripple through my petticoat, as Rose sniffs at things/steps on them/god knows what she was doing under there. Not attacking, I think, for which I am very grateful; there’s lots of dangling fabric that could easily have been interpreted as a cat toy. Off to my left, one of the store employees has seen the whole thing and is trying not to crack up. I manage to hold it together until Mary finishes, whereupon I share these fascinating developments with our audience, and ask whether Mary needs me to move out of the way of her puppet show. Fortunately her answer is “no,” because I’m kind of afraid that if I try to raise my skirts to evict the cat, she will decide my costume is her new toy. She seems happy to be settled against my left ankle for a time, and wanders out again before the puppet show is done.

If you someday read a book or story of mine in which a very proper Victorian lady has to maintain her composure because she cannot possibly tell the other people in the scene that a cat has gone spelunking under her dress, now you’ll know why.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/645862.html. Comment here or there.

A Year in Pictures – Gion Faces

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

These sculptures were displayed along an exterior wall in (I think) Gion, along with an adorable open-mouthed frog to which you were asked to feed 100 yen if you took photos. (Of course I fed the frog.) The faces were kinda creepy, but also kinda cool, especially at night.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/645388.html. Comment here or there.

I’d say “you can’t make this stuff up,” but apparently you can

So there’s this game called Crusader Kings II, which is a strategy game in which you play a medieval European dynasty — yes, you read that right, a dynasty. At any given time your “character” is the king of that dynasty, but when he kicks the bucket you switch over to playing his heir and so on. (Or her. But getting female inheritance going is near impossible if you aren’t Basque, and playing as Basque is near impossible all on its own. So.)

It’s quite well-designed; the people behind it seem to have a decent grasp of how medieval politics actually worked. You can’t go to war unless you have a casus belli, so no invading your neighbor without at least a fig leaf of justification. You spend half your time marrying off your unattached relatives, so that you’ll have allies when you do fight a war and three generations down the road your heir might inherit the crowns of four kingdoms. Etc. And after a while they started releasing expansions for non-Christian or non-kingdom options: The Old Gods for European paganism, Sword of Islam for the Middle East, The Republic so you can play as Venice or some place like that, Sons of Abraham for Judaism, Rajas of India for the subcontinent, etc. I haven’t played those personally, nor do I know all of the cultures in question well enough to judge quality, but I get the impression they continue to do a decent job of modeling historical dynamics in a realistic fashion — within, of course, the abstracted framework of a political/military strategy game.

. . . a mostly realistic fashion, that is. Because one of the DLCs is Sunset Invasion, in which the Aztecs invade Europe during the 13th century. Y’know. Like they did.

I thought, okay. The people making this game are obviously geeks, and geeks come up with these wild, over-the-top ideas. They’ve gotten it out of their system now.

Friends, I was wrong.

I was so very, very wrong.

You guys. I wrote a CKII fic for Yuletide this past year. I made it as crazy as I could, based on my experiences with the game and some advice from my husband, but I’m well aware that it fell short of the full craziness CKII can produce. But even had I hit my mark . . . it would have been nothing compared to that tale above. All hail Sebdann, spawn of Satan and Queen of Milesia!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/645172.html. Comment here or there.

A Year in Pictures – A Friend in Flowers

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I don’t often take photos of people, partly because my eye tends more toward the places I’ve traveled to visit, but partly because I’m not as good at capturing them. (My father, for the record, has developed a fair knack for it.) This one, however, turned out delightfully well. That’s a friend of mine looking utterly picturesque in a field of daisies, in the San Francisco Botanical Garden.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/645076.html. Comment here or there.

The whole way through, I’m narrating this in my head

For the last couple of months, I’ve been trying out the meditation thing — largely through an app called Headspace. I’m not terribly far into it yet, so I can’t give a full review, but the short form is that it’s a secular program developed by a former Buddhist monk that guides you through the basics of meditation. It starts off with a free series called “Take 10,” which is ten days of ten-minute sessions; then if you subscribe, it moves on to “Take 15″ (fifteen days of fifteen-minute sessions), followed by “Take 20″ (you can guess how that one goes). After that it expands into other stuff — the “Discovery Series” and so on — but I can’t tell you about those because I haven’t started them yet. The program does require you to take everything in order, but I can understand why; fifteen minutes is a non-trivial step up from ten minutes, and likewise twenty from fifteen, so working your way up to it isn’t a bad idea.

Because I’m only a little more than a month into the program, I can’t say much yet as to what it’s done for my mental health. But one thing I can say: it has exposed just how deep-seated my instinct to narrate is.

The largest portion of each session is spent focusing on your breath and letting go of other thoughts — or trying to. My mind, of course, immediately identifies this as prime Thinking About Story time. So I gently take it by the hand and lead it back to my breathing . . . until it wanders off again . . . so back to the breathing we go . . . and after a while it gets the idea, sort of. Whereupon it begins narrating my experience of focusing on my breathing. It isn’t really possible to make a story out of “this time my shoulders rose more than last time, and my exhalation was slower,” but god damn if my brain doesn’t try. And it thinks about what I’m experiencing — difficulties with not thinking included — and starts crafting the blog post in which I will tell you all about it. You have no idea how many times I’ve written this post in my head. (I have a faint hope that actually writing it will head this tendency off at the pass, but it is a faint hope indeed.)

It’s actually kind of hilarious, watching my brain scrabble for a way to narrativize what’s going on. I knew I was the sort of person who will run imaginary conversations in my head, or mentally compose blog posts, or whatever, but I underestimated just how much my thought processes are bound up in telling the story of what I’m thinking about. Turning that off is haaaaaaaaaaaaard. By which I mean, I basically haven’t succeeded yet.

This is not unrelated to my difficulty with the mindfulness thing in general: focusing on my physical experience of something, rather than thinking about other stuff while I do it. I live very much in my head, with all my imaginary friends (i.e. my characters), and if what I’m doing doesn’t demand my attention, I tend to daydream. I can focus when it’s something like karate; that’s detailed and intensive enough that I can sink my thoughts into muscle and bone and breath. But without a focal point like that, not so much.

So I keep practicing. One of these days I’ll get a handle on it . . . right?

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/644658.html. Comment here or there.

Exercise on the road

Apropos of my previous post: any recommendations as to ways for me to get exercise on a trip that will involve a new city almost every single day? I know that if step one is “leave your room and go to the hotel gym,” I won’t manage it. But stuff I can do in my room, without equipment — that might happen. I’ll need to do PT for my ankle regardless, so I’m going to have to set aside time for activity; it should be possible to tack other things on, if people have suggestions.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/644602.html. Comment here or there.

Tour begins tomorrow!

Quick reminder to folks living in Chicago, Seattle, Portland, Salem, Houston, Salt Lake City, San Diego, or San Franscisco, near enough to such places for this to be relevant: I’m going on tour! With the ever-awesome Mary Robinette Kowal! You can find us in the following places at the following times:

Thursday, May 1, 6:00 p.m.

DePaul University

Chicago, IL

Friday, May 2, 7:00 p.m.

University Bookstore

Seattle, WA

Saturday, May 3, 2:00 p.m.

Powell’s Books at Cedar Hill Crossing

Portland, OR

Sunday, May 4, 3:00 p.m.

Book Bin

Salem, OR

Tuesday, May 6, 6:30 p.m.

Murder by the Book

Houston, TX

Thursday, May 8, 6:00 p.m.

Weller Book Works

Salt Lake City, UT

Saturday, May 10, 2:00 p.m.

Mysterious Galaxy (Part of the Mysterious Galaxy 21st Birthday Bash!)

San Diego, CA

Sunday, May 11, 3:00 p.m.

Borderlands Books

San Francisco, CA

I hope to see some of you there!

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/644279.html. Comment here or there.