Kristin Cashore's Blog, page 14

Today's Election-Free Zone: 4-day-old Goat Meets 4-month-old Puppy

I actually think the puppy is doing a remarkable job restraining his excitement and yearning. Considering he's a puppy :o)

Today's Election-Free Zone: Baby Goats in Pajamas!

Today's Beacon of Hope and Rightness: Our First Lady

This is political and election-related, so I debated whether I was breaking my "Safe Zone" promise by posting it here. It's a speech First Lady Michelle Obama gave yesterday in Manchester, New Hampshire, so of course it refers to that horrible man. But: it also brings rightness back; it's uplifting and hopeful; it made me feel seen, heard, cared about, and understood as a woman and as a decent human being during this horrific election season. And -- she never says his name, for which I am grateful.

Here's a link to video and transcript of Michelle Obama's speech yesterday in Manchester, NH.

(The speech is actually only 21 minutes long. The first ten minutes is the stuff that is SO GOOD TO HEAR, the next ten minutes is stuff about Hillary, and the last ten minutes is FLOTUS shaking hands while her Secret Service detail anxiously hovers.)

Today's Election-Free Zone: Earthset and Earthrise

From October 2007 to June 2009, a Japanese spacecraft called Kaguya orbited the moon. Kaguya had cameras, and the cameras recorded, among other things, views of the Earth rising and setting over the moon.

Here's Earth setting over (or under?) the south pole of the moon! (BTW, if you get my posts as emails and the videos don't work, just click through to my Blog Actual.)



For more photos and videos (all breath-taking), check out "New Gems from the Moon" at the blog of the Planetary Society.

Today's Election-Free Zone: Links to Beautiful Umbrellas

Let's start big: The magical unicorn umbrella promises to allow you to "Summon unicorns whilst staying dry." Disclaimer: "Unicorn sightings may vary depending on the strength of your imagination and the drugs you've consumed."

Whatever. Look at the handle. It obviously summons unicorns. Available at firebox.com.
Next up: This clear dome umbrella has an adorable street scene... and this one is a birdcage!

A Lulu Guinness umbrella, sadly out of stock at theumbrellashop.co.uk.
Next up, Bella Umbrella is a gorgeous umbrella store in Seattle. In addition to selling beautiful umbrellas, here are the vintage umbrellas they offer for rental (beautifully arranged by color!)... and here's an example of the umbrella wall they will help you build, should happen to require an umbrella wall, which is a completely normal human need.

One of the gorgeous vintage umbrellas at Bella Umbrella...
Next, check out the umbrellas and parasols at Parasolerie Heurtault in Paris. Functional umbrellas that are also pure art...

And, also in Paris, the Alexandra Sojfer collection. Alexandra's umbrellas are handmade in her in-house workshop, and they are SO ELEGANT. I know because I have one, and in fact, I may as well end this post with some pictures of a couple of my own umbrellas... randomly chosen, because they're the two I felt like photographing today.

This is my Alexandra Sojfer umbrella.
Inside detail.
My "Images d'Épinal" umbrella; paper dolls from Épinal, France.
Detail.
Come back to the blog tomorrow for comforting scenes of Earth, from the perspective of the moon.

A Promise to My Readers

I promise, for the next month, to keep this blog a safe and comforting place. I don't know how often I'll be able to post, but when I do, I'll post fun and comforting things. If you want a place on the internets where you won't have to read about that person or be touched by his destructive toxicity, you can come here.

I probably won't post much political stuff at all, but just to start things off, here's a pantsuit flashmob in support of Hillary. Why? In the words of its creators,

WE DANCEBecause Love is LoveBecause Black Lives MatterBecause climate change is realBecause women's rights are human rightsBecause immigrants make America greatBecause every vote mattersWe dance for HillaryBecause she fights for us 

OFFICIAL "PANTSUIT POWER" FLASH MOB FOR HILLARY from Celia & Mia for HRC on Vimeo.

Tomorrow I will come back and blog about the best umbrellas on the internets.

"Take first, then claim they let you"

I haven't been blogging stuff about the election, because I have no interest in subjecting myself or you to any additional acknowledgment of the waste of humanity Republicans have chosen as their representative. He would fit perfectly into one of my books as one of my vile kings. And yet there he is, a chosen one. Because this is our country. I've built a little wall around my heart, to protect myself from the infection.

The trouble is that he gets in everywhere. That's one of his disgusting superpowers.

One of my sisters just forwarded a link to this article by Susan Dominus in the New York Times: Donald Trump: King of the Old Boys’ Club, and Perhaps Its Destroyer. It quietly pulls apart some of the little threads about who this person is. It got through my wall and made me cry. You should read it.

And now I'm done with this topic on my blog.

In Which We Do Boda Borg

It's October.... so we did Boda Borg! Without a doubt, one of my favorite monthly new things so far. Oh my gourd, it was fun.

What's Boda Borg? I'll explain best I can, but first, for those readers who know what it is and are worried that this post will contain clues or cheats, I promise it doesn't. It does contain some photos from inside the Boda Borg rooms, but I'm confident the photos are vague enough that they don't give much away that isn't already obvious.

BTW, Swedish Graceling cover -----> Because Boda Borg comes from Sweden! Follow that link for locations and other good stuff. Here in Boston, we're lucky to have the only stateside Boda Borg facility.

So, first I'm going to share the official definition of Boda Borg, then I'll describe what it's actually like. Officially: Boda Borg is a real-world gaming environment. Teams of 3-5 people move through a series of "Quests," tackling a variety of mental and physical challenges. Success in the first challenge means entry into the next challenge and so on… Failure in any challenge means starting over or selecting another Quest.

What it's actually like: You form a team of 3 to 5 friends. You enter the facility, which is a series of corridors full of doors. You choose a door, enter a room... and once you're in the room, you have to figure out how to successfully "win" in that room. There's a time limit; every room contains some sort of puzzle or challenge; and it's rarely clear what the puzzle or challenge is. So, it isn't just a matter of performing the challenge in the allotted time; it's a matter of figuring out what the challenge is to begin with. Stepping in the wrong place by accident because you haven't figured out what the challenge is yet could make you fail the room. For example, there are some rooms that have to be crossed without anyone ever touching the floor, so the moment you step into the room, you fail. You quickly learn to peek your head in and take a good look around before stepping in!

Meet my Quest team.

Kevin, Irina, me, LuQ!
If you do successfully win in a room, you pass through another door (or hatch, or hard-to-get-to opening) that leads to another room... where again, you have to figure out the challenge, then execute it, in the allotted time. At Boda Borg Boston, there are about 13 separate Quests, and each Quest contains 2 to 4 rooms. You're never inside any Quest for very long, because each room has a two-minute time limit.

Each Quest has a theme. (Learn more about the individual Quests here.) I took these pictures out in the corridor, as we waited our turn to enter...

Spook House is one of the Quests...
as is Platoon (one of my favorites!)...
and Alcatraz.
The Quest doors in the corridor are green, red, or black. The green doors lead to mostly mental challenges; the red doors to a mix of mental and physical; and the black doors, to the most physical challenges. Here are some pictures from inside the Quests, though I'm not going to identify which Quests they are, for those of you concerned about clues.

So pastoral.
Waiting for a low door to open so we can enter the next room in this Quest.
Easy.
Yup.
You need at least three people, in different positions at different times, to win most of the rooms. And there were a number of rooms I couldn't even have gotten through without the helping hands of Irina, LuQ, and Kevin. Over the course of about five hours, we tried almost all the Quests and successfully completed a few. But more often than not, we were met with the glowing red eye of failure…


Superbanan was my favorite Quest. We only managed to complete the first room, but it was SO satisfying!


What made it so fun? For starters, the joy of crawling, sliding, and climbing; the warm fuzzies of teamwork with friends; the satisfaction of successfully achieving things I was initially certain I couldn't achieve; the delight of how smart my friends are; that feeling of, "We can figure out how to do this."

My adorable team.
I recommend the all-day pass (so you can stay for as long as you want), and most especially, kneepads.

That was our new thing for October! And stay tuned, because November is going to be awesome.

In Which We Cut Things With Lasers

It's September…

So we learned how to cut things with lasers!


That magnificent creature was cut by me using Asylasaur, the 100W CO2 laser cutter at Artisan's Asylum in Somerville, MA. Before you get too impressed, it it was NOT designed by me. The human designer and the carbon dioxide laser did a lot more work than I did; I basically pushed a piece of acrylic around, clicked on a few settings, and pressed a button.

Here's Asylasaur, the laser – or, the left side of it, anyway.


The reasons you should never operate a laser unattended include freak things like something going wrong with the laser so that it aims in the wrong direction, but really, much MUCH more likely, fire. A laser cuts through flammable things, like paper and wood, by vaporizing them. If you thought your dryer was a fire hazard, consider that at least you're not vaporizing your laundry.

Unfortunately, I was so focused on learning how to use the laser that I didn't get a lot of pictures. But basically, the top opens, and you place things you want to cut (wood, paper, leather, acrylic) inside it as if it were a very, very big scanner…

Kevin does the thing.
In back is the long, horizontal tube that creates the laser itself. A series of mirrors bounces the laser around the insides, directing it to the head, which then directs the laser to the object you have placed there to be cut. Please note, this is a completely inadequate description that skips many steps.


The crosshairs in that picture indicate where the laser will begin its next cut. You send commands to the laser using the computer console nearby. Once you've turned the laser on, there's a lot of noise, because it has an enormous exhaust system for removing the gaseous nastiness created by vaporizing things like acrylic, leather, paper, or wood. And indeed, the process was a bit stinky! Also, bright. After a while, I decided to STOP watching the laser while it was cutting :o)

Naturally, you have to close the protective door before the laser begins cutting, so my picture of the actual cutting process isn't so great…


But the glowing pink rod in the background is the working laser itself, which is visible while inside the tube, then invisible as it bounces from mirror to mirror and onto the thing you are cutting. Which, in the picture above, is the third in a line of unicorns.


We cut our unicorns out of acrylic, not glass, as it may seem. Apparently any laser strong enough to cut through glass will actually shatter the glass, though a laser can be used at a less-powerful setting to etch designs onto glass.

Artisan’s Asylum, Inc. is a non-profit community fabrication center located in Somerville, Massachusetts. Their mission is to support and promote the teaching, learning and practice of fabrication, and they teach an array of classes, including but not limited to bicycle-building, robotics and electronics, fiber arts, jewelry and metalsmithing, machining, screenprinting, and woodworking… They were super welcoming and friendly, too, so check it out if you live in the area.  #artisansasylum

So, this was our new thing for September! Thanks to our instructor, Brian C. Johnson, who mysteriously knew, before ever he met me, that if I could create any one thing with a laser, it would be a unicorn.

In Which the Author, Between Revisions, Makes Creatures Out Of Socks

I finished my revision!

My next responsibility is to start the next revision (draft 7) as soon as possible.

But before I do that, I'm taking just a few days off... from revising. Not from creating things.

Those of you who were around the blog in January might remember Basil, the common house zebra. Well, after I created Basil, a request came in for Sock Sunny and Sock Tanker.

This is real-life Sunny.

This is real-life Tanker.

Sunny the dog and Tanker the cat live in Florida with two seven-year-olds. Sunny LOVES Tanker. Tanker's feelings for Sunny are more complicated, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that months and months after acquiring the appropriate socks, I FINALLY got to work.

I started with Sock Sunny, because a sock dog requires less altering of a sock zebra pattern than a sock cat does. Socks animals made from this pattern generally turn into long-faced, thin animals, not wonderfully roly-poly cats with round heads. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do when it came time to make Sock Tanker, to be honest.

Anyway, I began cutting, sewing, and stuffing, modifying the pattern somewhat to give Sock Sunny a face that was less long and shaped a bit more like Sunny's actual face.


Real-life Sunny is an Australian cattle dog, which means he has a half-"mask" over one side of his face that I knew was going to be impossible to find in a pair of socks. But I was able to find some socks that reproduce some of his speckles.

Real-life Sunny has big ears, a brown nose, an anxious expression ("Am I a good dog? Am I a good dog?"), a long tail, and an extremely sweet disposition. I hid a little heart under his big head. 

Because of his long tail and the thickness of his fabric, Sock Sunny has a power Basil Zebra doesn't: he can sit up on his own.
 
Here he is hanging out with his brother Basil.

Then it was time to get started on Tanker. The solution I came up with for the pattern problem was to choose a short and extremely stretchy pair of socks that adjusted well to lots of stuffing.
You can't see it in the picture I shared, but real-life Tanker has enormous blue eyes.

Real-life Tanker's breed is called Stumpy Manx, which means that he doesn't really have a tail, he has more of a stump. This was lucky for me, because I made Sock Tanker out of a pretty small pair of socks, and I wouldn't have had enough sock left to make him a long tail...


He is softer and more fuzzy than it looks in the pictures.

So here they are! Soon I will be packing them away for their journey south.

By the time they get to their new home, I will be well into my next revision.