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Some of you may recognize this fellow from In Ashes Lie. It’s the Uffington White Horse, a stylized figure carved into the chalk hillside. The only really good way to get a photo of it is from a helicopter or plane, but I did my best . . . .
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By the time I went on my honeymoon, I was starting to get better at photographic composition. This one especially pleased me, with the dolphins in the foreground, the crumbling walls in the background, and the intense blue of the harbor at Rhodes to contrast with the sculpture and the sky.
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This fellow stands on a monument to the Battle of Grunwald, just north of the Stare Miasto in Kraków. He’s actually celebrating the victory of Polish and Lithuanian forces over the Teutonic Knights . . . but the dude looks like he’s belting out an opera aria on the topic.
Just a reminder that the Design Your Own Dragon contest will be ending in a little more than a week, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on April 30th. This is your chance not only to win an ARC of Voyage of the Basilisk (once we have some on hand), but to have your very own creation included in the Memoirs of Lady Trent. I may choose up to three winners, depending partly on how many entries I get — so in a sense, the more of you that enter, the better your chances are!
(Okay, really I’m just selfish. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of reading the entries thus far, and am eager to see what else people come up with.)
E-mail your submissions to dragons.of.trent {at} gmail.com. You’ve got about one week left!
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This is another one I dropped a filter on, in this case because doing so made the sculptural details more distinct. It’s one of the tympana over the entrances to Notre Dame, and reminds me oddly of the temples we visited India, which is the only other place I’ve ever seen that density and intricacy of carving over a large surface. (Though if this had been an Indian temple instead of a French cathedral, the whole building would have been carved like that.)
Things I’ve been saying in different places ’round the interwebz . . . .
“Seeing the Invisible” — this month’s post at SFNovelists is a review of Invisible, the ebook collection Jim Hines put together of guest posts and additional essays on the topic of representation. Proceeds from sales go to charity.
“The Gospel of Combat” — an excerpt from Writing Fight Scenes, which will be familiar to long-time readers of this blog. You can comment there for a chance to get a free copy of the ebook, though!
Interview at My Bookish Ways — in which I talk about a variety of things.
“The Dreaded Label ‘Mary Sue'” — guest post at Far Beyond Reality, talking about female characters who don’t apologize for their awesomeness.
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My mother came to town for a visit recently. Before her arrival, I sent an e-mail to her and my brother (and my husband and my sister-in-law) suggesting that perhaps we might visit Filoli . . . and sheepishly admitting I might have a photographic motive for being interested. Much to my amusement, my mother responded that she had been thinking the exact same thing! (My father: not the only photographer/pusher in the family.) Unlike my sole previous visit, this time I was there early enough in spring to catch the tulips before their glory days had ended.
Tonight I saw a movie which is probably the most refrackulous thing I’ve watched in ages.
Its Japanese title is Dokuro-jo no shichinin, and it’s actually a recording of a stage production, deliberately intended (so the blurb for it said) to be a blend of cinema with live performance. That much is comprehensible.
But the plot, you guys. The plot.
It just —
These characters —
I — I have no way to describe it that wouldn’t be full of spoilers. Which you probably don’t care about because the number of you who will ever see it is minuscule. But I can’t tell you why Tayu’s crew of prostitutes are so awesome. Or who exactly that one dude turned out to be (though I can say that I turned to my sister about ten minutes prior to that reveal and said “if he turns out to be X, I am going to laugh my ass off.” Of course he was X.) I just —
Okay, look, here’s an example. The story takes place in 1590, eight years after the death of Oda Nobunaga. There’s this guy who’s set up shop in Skull Castle in the Kantou region, calling himself Tenmao, the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. (This story: it is SUBTLE, yo.) It turns out that he, along with several of the other characters, used to be one of Nobunaga’s retainers, and hasn’t really gotten over his lord’s death. I believe the technical term for his state of mind would be, hmmm, how do they put it, oh yeah — bugfuck crazy. So one of his former comrades-in-arms goes to Skull Castle, and something like the following conversation ensues:
TENMAO: See this mask on my helmet? It was made from the skull of our dead lord!
FORMER COMRADE IN ARMS: That’s a little crazy, dude.
TENMAO: That’s funny, coming from you. I happen to know those beads you wear are made from our dead lord’s bones!
FCIA: . . . okay, that’s true. <caresses bone necklace>
TENMAO: And this drink in my cup is made from our dead lord’s blood!
Whereupon he drains the cup, kisses his former comrad-in-arms, and spits the blood into his mouth, which turns out to be drugged, so FCIA also goes what you might call bugfuck crazy.
It is kabuki on crack and cranked up to eleventy-one. It also dodges the Smurfette trap (three of the seven heroes facing down Tenmao are women), swings wildly between broad comedy and rather grim drama, features some kind of amazing stage fighting, and has a character who basically figures out how to turn the fact that he can’t make up his mind which side he’s on into his superpower.
I am so buying this the instant it’s available on DVD. And then I am going to inflict it on everybody around me.
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This is a wall mural of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting of The Last Supper. It sits in St. Kinga’s Chapel in the Wieliczka Salt Mine . . . which means that, like pretty much everything there, it’s carved out of rock salt. Which, you have to admit, is pretty impressive!
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Most of our time at Kiyomizudera was spent wandering around outside, but there were portions of the visit where we passed through some of the buildings. I quite liked the lamps along this gallery — even if I have no idea where in the temple we were when I took the photo.
I made reference to this in my previous post; I’d forgotten that I hadn’t actually said anything about it before now.
I’m going to Okinawa in July. Every few years, on an irregular schedule, Shihan and various other people put together an intensive karate and kobudo seminar, bringing in people from a variety of countries (Germany, Spain, Denmark, the U.S.) for about a week in Naha and on Kori Island. It will be my first time going; the last one was five years ago, and I was much too low-ranking to attend. Sometimes there’s a tournament, but apparently Shihan got tired of waiting for other parties to get their act together, so this time it’s a seminar only.
I made the decision to go before I knew I was having ankle problems; I paid the fee before I got told I was going to need surgery. But honesty compels me to admit that before I went to the doctor, I told Kyle that I didn’t care what the prognosis was, I was going to Okinawa anyway. Because it’s bad enough to have to do this again: I will be damned if I let it take away my chance to experience that kind of intensive training. I’m going to be sweating to death for 4-6 hours a day in an un-air-conditioned budokan, and that isn’t exactly a thing to look forward to — but I am.
And then I’ll come home and have surgery and not go to karate for a month or more. But before then, I’ll work my butt off.
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The Église Saint-Jean-de-Montmartre in Paris is decorated in a very unusual style — elements of Art Nouveau, and (as you can see) a mosaic surface that almost looks like beads. While I’m a big fan of Gothic architecture and other standard church designs, it’s also nice to encounter one that breaks the mold in attractive ways.
Same song, second verse. A little bit louder, a little bit more JESUS H CHRIST THIS ISN’T FUNNY ANY MORE.
Which is to say, I will be having ankle surgery.
Again.
Same ligament as before . . .
. . . just on the other foot.
Listen up, kids: sprain your ankles too often as a youth, and this will be your reward before you’re anywhere near your dotage. An orthopedist wiggling your foot around and saying “Wow!,” followed immediately by “Sorry, that’s not what you want to hear your doctor say, is it?” An unstable ankle joint that’s causing microabrasions and is already building up a bone spur, so let’s get this surgery done soon, shall we, before we’ve got ourselves a lovely case of arthritis? Oh and it’s so helpful that you still have the boot from the last round. We can just stick you right back in it. Not your first rodeo, here’s your forms, you know how this goes, and hey you’ve even got some blog posts to remind you of the unpleasant things in your future. Isn’t this great.
The surgery isn’t scheduled yet, but it will be some time between the very end of July and mid-September. Putting it off that long probably isn’t the most intelligent thing I’ve ever done, but god dammit I am going to Okinawa. The last time this karate seminar happened was five years ago; I don’t know when it will happen again. And I am not letting my stupid fucking ankles keep me from it.
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Happy Tax Day to my U.S. readers. 😛
Photographing museum exhibits is hard. The light is often low, or else glares off the glass; the glass itself is generally smudged, scratched, or both. I’ve started getting better at it, though, and this shot is possibly my finest museum photograph ever. I’ve mentioned before that I clean up my photos in Lightroom, right? Well, this one is almost completely untouched. I cropped a bit of the left edge and upped the clarity by a tick, and that’s it. Sometimes the picture just comes out right on the first try.
I play solitaire a lot on my tablet, and there’s a banner add that has been popping up on it lately which is, I think, the worst ad I’ve ever seen.
It flashes between a white bar with black text and a black bar with white text. And I do mean flashes — very nearly at the level of “isn’t there something about this kind of stimulus causing epileptic seizures?” It is phenomenally distracting. Good ad, right? Nope — because it is so. bloody. annoying. that I might light my hair on fire before voluntarily tapping it. (Nor is it in a location where I’m likely to tap it by accident.) And if you’re thinking that even annoyance-publicity is still publicity, and they’re at least getting their product into my head . . .
. . . the text of the banner is “(1) Free Game.”
That’s it. No brand name. No hint of what type of game it is. No image I might recognize if I see it again later in a less annoying context. Just a seizure-inducing, content-less banner which is so obnoxious, it’s giving me a strong inclination to stop playing solitaire entirely, so I’ll never have to see it again. Which is about as profound of an advertising failure as I can imagine.
What were they thinking?
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This is another lucky shot: the squirrel happened to stay still long enough for me to catch him in this great pose. Every time I look at him, I hear Eddie Izzard in my head, going on about the difference between “Executive Transvestite” and “Action Transvestite.” This, my friends, is distinctly an Action Squirrel. 🙂
There’s a particular . . . sound effect? I don’t even know if that’s the right word to apply. It’s a quality sometimes heard in the background beat of techno songs. I have a hard time describing it in words (and can’t think of any examples to link to, since I hate the songs that do this and therefore always turn them off) — it’s kind of this muffled effect at the end of the beat that then slides into the sharp beginning of the next one — but the easiest way for me to summarize it is, it makes me feel like I’m being punched in the eardrums. Repeatedly. Ad nauseam.
I don’t suppose anybody a) knows what I’m talking about and b) can tell me whether it has a specific name?
. . . and he does bee-yoo-ti-ful book covers:
This one was revealed on Tor.com yesterday; I would have posted about it sooner, but I spent pretty much all of yesterday out of the house. Check out that link if you’d like to see commentary from Irene Gallo (art director at Tor, i.e. the person who makes book covers happen), Todd, and myself.
It’s, um. Purty. Real purty. *^_^* Don’t you agree?
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Getting a good shot of Trevi Fountain is exceedingly difficult. You wouldn’t know it to look at this shot, but the place was mobbed with approximately eighty billion people that day. To get this photo, I had to worm my way to the direct center of the place and up to the very edge of the fountain itself, then lean back as far as I could to take the widest shot possible. It paid off, though — and I must say that Trevi is one of those sights I found to be exactly as splendid as I had hoped.
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The structure you see in the background there is the entrance tower to the twelfth-century Chennakesava Temple complex in Belur. It is huge; this is a shot up at it through the well in the courtyard (a framing I was rather proud of). The density of carving you see there is about par for the course in the temples we visited, which had me reflecting a lot on how clumsy a great deal of twelfth-century European art is by comparison.
