Author: Erik

Serpent Mound

Erik

Serpent Mound, located in Ohio in the United States, is an enormous earthwork built on a grassy plateau above Ohio Brush Creek. It is one of many large earthworks in North America, but it is unusual in representing an image when seen from above. This image has been interpreted as a snake swallowing an egg.

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Serpent Mound, photograph by Eric Ewing via Wikimedia

The date of construction is uncertain, but recent research suggests that Serpent Mound was created in the last few centuries CE when the river valleys west of the central Appalachian Mountains were occupied by a people known to modern archaeologists as the Adena culture. We have no way of knowing what they called themselves. The Adena were a sophisticated culture at the center of a trade network stretching north beyond the Great Lakes south to the Gulf of Mexico. One of the distinctive features of their culture was the construction of large earthworks, many of which served funerary purposes, but may also have marked ceremonial centers or areas for gathering and trade.

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Attack of the Scones

Erik

For the second of our Star Wars rewatches, I made cranberry scones—great with a little blackberry jam.

Attack of the Scones

Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup dried cranberries
  • 9 tablespoons cold butter
  • 2 cups flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • pinch of salt
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 1 cup milk
  • splash of vanilla

Soak cranberries in juice or water for an hour to plump

Cut the dry ingredients into the butter until it forms fine crumbs

Add the egg and wet ingredients and mix just to combine

Turn out on a floured surface and knead briefly

Shape into a circle 1 inch thick and cut into wedges

Bake at 450 F / 230 C for 10 minutes

 

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!

Our Star Wars Rewatch Project: Episode II

Erik

The rewatch continues with Episode II—Attack of the Clones.

1. Best Fight

Eppu: Obi-Wan and Jango Fett on Kamino. It’s cool to have an encounter where a bounty hunter uses their wits and gear to successfully counter the skills of a Jedi, and takes advantage of the various structures on the landing platform (and the sides of the buildings!) during the fight.

151119JediErik: The Jedi vs. the battle droids in the Geonosian arena. The first time we’ve ever gotten to see Jedi in mass combat.

2. Best Line

Erik: “Life seems so much simpler when you’re fixing things.” Anakin in the Lars homestead garage on Tatooine. This line sums up so much about Anakin’s arc as a tragic hero. He wants to fix the world, and the dark side seems like the simplest way of doing it.

Eppu: “Jar-Jar, I don’t wish to hold you up. I’m sure you have a great deal to do.” Amidala’s the only one anywhere, ever, to tell Jar-Jar to shut up!

3. Best Minor Character

Eppu: Taun We on Kamino because of her(?) picture perfect professionalism.

Erik: Lama Su, prime minister of Kamino. Both the animation and the voice work are just a little unnerving without ever being overtly threatening. Excellently done.

4. Best Reveal

Erik: The strains of the “Imperial March” sliding into the soundtrack as the clones assemble. Just a few notes can say so much.

Eppu: This is a little meta, but: Christopher Lee in the movie!

5. Best Save

Jeditemplearchives Padme Geonosis Pillar

Eppu: Padmé climbing on top of the pillar in the Geonosis arena prior to some aggressive negotiations. That’s a tough senator!

Erik: Yoda and the clone troops landing in the Geonosian arena in the nick of time.

6. Best Visual

Star Wars Approaching Coruscant

Erik: Senator Amidala’s ship approaching Coruscant at the beginning of the movie. Such a gorgeous ship and planet.

Eppu: Agreed so much!

Extra: Best Foot in Mouth

Eppu: “So have you. Grown more beautiful, I mean. Well, f-for a senator, I mean.” Anakin to Padmé in response to her comment “My goodness, you’ve grown.” Fortunately Anakin’s manner improves after, otherwise we might not have had the romance that gave us Luke and Leia.

Erik: “Meesa acecpt this with mooie mooie humility and, uh…” Jar-Jar Binks, Destroyer of the Galactic Republic

Images: Jedi vs. droids via StarWars.com. Padmé on Geonosis via JediTempleArchives.com. Coruscant via StarWars.com

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

The “Sheer Dumb Luck” Table

Erik

150910rpg

Sometimes the tools you use the most are the simplest ones. This is one of the simplest things in my arsenal when I run a role-playing game, but I use it all the time.

Your players will often ask you questions that you didn’t think of ahead of time. Is the guard wearing gloves? Are there any pine cones lying around? Does this planet have any beryllium deposits near the surface?

Of course, if it matters to the adventure whether or not the guard is wearing gloves, then you have your answer and you go with it, but often either yes or no will do, you just have to pick one. It can be exhausting to always be having to decide, so you can just flip a coin, but not everything in the world is a fifty-fifty chance. If you’ve already established that it’s a cold night, the chances that the guard is wearing gloves are pretty high.

That’s where the table comes in, which, in honor of my favorite Harry Potter character, I have dubbed: The “Sheer Dumb Luck” table.

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Simply pick the descriptor on the list that sounds right for whatever your players asked and roll 3d6. Is the guard wearing gloves? Very likely. Are there any pine cones? Somewhat likely. Any beryllium? Virtually impossible. If you roll equal to or under the number given, the answer is yes. If higher, no.

  • 4–Virtually impossible
  • 6–Very unlikely
  • 8–Unlikely
  • 10–Fifty/fifty
  • 11–Somewhat likely
  • 12–Likely
  • 14–Very likely
  • 15–Virtually certain

And the best thing about this table: sometimes, once you’ve rolled, you realize that the opposite answer is actually better. One way or another, you’ve answered the question and the adventure can keep rolling.

Like everything, it’s a tool, not a rule. Not everyone likes to leave as much up to chance in an adventure as I do. Use it if it helps, ignore it if it doesn’t.

Images: Books and dice by Erik Jensen; “Five points…” via rosereturns.tumblr.com

Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.

Travel: Some Basics

Erik

151116caravanWhether it’s carrying the One Ring to Mount Doom or sailing the Azure Sea, travel is an important part of a lot of fantasy stories and games. For those of us more accustomed to traveling by car, train, bus, and plane than by foot, horse, oxcart, or galleon, this poses a lot of practical problems. How far can your characters travel in a day? How long will it take them to get from point A to point B? And what do they need in order to make the journey successfully?

This is the introduction to a History for Writers series that looks at the evidence of history to help provide practical answers to your questions about travel in the pre-modern world. We’ll look at a few basic issues today. In future installments we’ll examine specific modes of travel, terrains, and problems.

Note that what we’re discussing here is based on real-world history, so it applies only to the extent that your world resembles historical conditions. If your characters travel by foot, horse, and sail, much of the information here will be directly applicable. If they have teleportation and magic carpets, adjust accordingly.

Here are a few basic issues that apply to just about any kind of travel in a pre-industrial world:

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The Phantom Mousse

Erik

To accompany the first of our Star Wars rewatches, I made a dark chocolate mousse. As rich as Queen Amidala’s wardrobe and as dark as Senator Palpatine’s heart, this mousse kept us happy through the podrace and droid battles.

The Phantom Mousse

Ingredients

  • 7 oz dark chocolate
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 4 tablespoons dark rum
  • 3 eggs

Melt the chocolate, butter, and rum together in a double boiler over barely simmering water

Separate the eggs

Remove the melted chocolate from the heat and whisk in the egg yolks

Beat the egg whites until they form soft peaks

Whisk the egg whites into the chocolate mixture

Spoon into dishes and chill for an hour

 

Image by Eppu Jensen

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!

Dynastic Race Theory and Why Revision Is Essential

Erik5 Comments

151109steleThe words revision and revisionism, when it comes to history, have a bad smell. They are lobbed as insults against people who propose new ways of understanding things that already have a conventional explanation. “We had it right the first time, stop monkeying with it” is the implied retort. Revision, however, is essential to the study of history. No matter how well we think we understand something, our grasp of history is always partial and conditional. New evidence, new ideas, and new questions applied to the known sources frequently yield new results and we often discover that our conventional explanations, while not wrong, are incomplete. And sometimes they are just wrong.

Here’s an example. As the European study of ancient Egyptian history developed in the 1800s, European colonialism was also spreading across Africa. For scholars who supported the imperialist agenda, or at least accepted its intellectual framework (and there were those who didn’t, but they were a minority), ancient Egypt presented a problem. Imperialist thinking declared that Africans were incapable of reaching a high level of culture without the help of superior white men, and therefore European colonization of Africa was not just a profitable venture but a moral imperative. Yet there could be no denying that ancient Egypt had been a high culture. How could both things be true?

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Garrisons: Solving the Wrong Problem

Erik

Sometimes you put a lot of time and effort into solving a problem, only to realize that you were coming at the problem from the wrong angle and your solution doesn’t actually fix anything, or even just makes things worse. (Or at least I do. I do this all the time.) It’s what I think of as “solving the wrong problem.” Blizzard Entertainment, creators of World of Warcraft, has been solving the wrong problem in the latest expansion, and garrisons are the manifestation of that mistake.

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The Aliance garrison, where I’ve spent entirely too much of my gaming time.

It’s not that there aren’t problems to be solved. WoW‘s player base is getting older and a lot of us have less time to play, can’t sit down and play in long sessions like we used to, and aren’t as interested in investing lots of time and effort into chasing big goals, but we still want to play and enjoy the game. Garrisons were, in my opinion, a good-faith effort at solving this problem, but they came at it from the wrong direction.

This weekend is Blizzcon, Blizzard’s big event when they talk about what’s coming for their games and we’re going to hear all about the next expansion for WoW. I hope we hear something that addresses what garrisons got wrong.

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Superfluous Ghosts

Erik

It is odd to find oneself arguing that a ghost story would be better without the ghosts, but that’s how I felt coming away from Crimson Peak.

Crimson Peak, as others have noted, is a Gothic romance. Ghosts are de rigeur for the genre. They give form to emotional traumas and compel the hero or heroine to uncover the horrible secrets behind them. The ghosts of Crimson Peak fulfill this role and prod the film’s heroine to expose the dark past in the house. Eventually. She takes an awful lot of prodding. In the meantime, the ghosts just take up screen time being ghostly and doing ghost stuff, none of it terribly interesting.

151029Crimson

“The ghosts are a metaphor,” we are told early in the film, except they aren’t. A metaphor is when one thing stands for or represents another, but there is nothing metaphorical about the ghosts of Crimson Peak. The ghost of the old woman in the bathtub with a meat cleaver in her head does not represent the lingering traumas of the past or the madness of the characters. It represents the fact that an old woman was killed in that bathtub with a meat cleaver to the head. The crumbling, bleeding house is a metaphor for the unraveling of the family that dwells there, but the ghosts are the most literal ghosts you have ever met.

The only purpose the ghosts serve in the narrative is to nudge our heroine Edith into uncovering the truth. They might as well just be standing in the hallway holding signs that say “PLOT-RELEVANT INFORMATION IN THIS CLOSET” or “ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS BATHROOM.” They are narrative shortcuts that save the heroine the bother of actually having to do much thinking. The most interesting part of the story is when Edith finally does a little investigating, but the ghosts do most of the uncovering for her and rob the story of complexity. I would rather have watched Edith do the work of piecing together what was going on at Allerdale Hall without the ghosts standing around holding their “THIS WAY TO THE PLOT” signs.

“It’s not a ghost story,” we are also told early in the film. “It’s a story with ghosts.” I give the movie enormous credit for its gorgeous visual design and for showing how well a period piece can incorporate active and effective female characters. But maybe it should have been a story without ghosts.

Image: Crimson Peak, (c) Universal Pictures 2015 via imdb

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

Feasts and Fools

Erik1 Comment

151026jackHalloween will soon be upon us. The origins of this holiday are obscure. It is often connected with the Gaelic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, but Halloween, at least as popularly celebrated today in the US and some other countries, has wider connections. It is an example of a type of holiday found in many cultures: the “feast of fools.”

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