Starships!

Eppu1 Comment

Three years old at this point, but still, oh, so, SO great: Starships!

https://vimeo.com/46927209

Starships! by bironic

“A celebration of pilots, captains, engineers, crew members, and the spacecraft they love to fly. (And race, and crash, and fix, and play in, and fight in, and…)”

– bironic

It’s a great time to be a geek – not only are more SFFnal stories than before being published and adapted to the screen and stage, but making, remixing, and sharing our own content is incredibly easy.

P.S. Be sure to read bironic’s making-of note!

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Museum Materials: Volcano Day in Pompeii

Eppu

Speaking of the excellence of museum and library collections: below are resources on the destruction of Pompeii I found by visiting only two museum sites.

“A Day in Pompeii” is an 8-minute high-definition video on how a series of eruptions wiped out Pompeii over 48 hours, produced by Museum Victoria (Melbourne Museum) and Zero One Animation for an exhibition at Melbourne Museum in 2009.

A Day in Pompeii – Full-length animation via Zero One Animation

It would’ve been more stunning with changes in the POV rather than a static camera, but it was still interesting.

To accompany the exhibit, Melbourne Museum produced a wealth of additional online material.

Melbourne Museum Day in Pompeii Box

Unfortunately there’s currently no index page, but articles are still available on the Museum website (do a search for Pompeii). For example, House of the Vine is a nifty virtual recreation of a beautiful Pompeian house. And did you know that Pompeii had running water and lavatories? There is even a replica of a loaf of bread from Pompeii:

Melbourne Museum Day in Pompeii Loaf of Bread

After Melbourne, the exhibition traveled to other places. The Western Australian Museum also built a helpful site, still fully available, to go with their 2010 version in Perth.

Complementary views can be found from photos of the current state of the city at Pompeii in Pictures, website by Jackie and Bob Dunn. (Getting to the photos themselves takes a bit of clicking through the menus, but they’re there.)

Images: Box, (c) Soprintendenza Speciale per i Beni Archeologici di Napoli e Pompei via Melbourne Museum (House of Julius Polybius, Pompeii; original iron and bronze fittings and wood reconstruction). Loaf of bread via Melbourne Museum (bakery in Pompeii; plaster copy of an original, carbonized loaf)

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

The Glory of Library and Museum Materials

Eppu1 Comment

I really love the Internet for research. It connects us to materials and people around the world. As a visual person, I find the availability of photographs and other visualizations on just about any subject especially gratifying. You can visit places and eras that you physically may not be able to.

NYPL Digital The Drawbridge

One of the invaluable services libraries and museums provide, especially now that more of their collections are being digitized, is access to historical periods and obscure topics. (Like the Peter Parker collection of 80 paintings of Chinese patients with large tumors or other major deformities – that’s not a joke!)

And that’s only the beginning – using library and museum websites and digital collections to find primary sources for research has other benefits as well:

  • Copious metadata: the provenance (origins and history) of documents or items, including details like dates, original creators, owners, and chain of custody, are clearly marked when known, and when unknown, that is clearly stated, too.
  • Materials that physical items were made of are also given, often with information on the techniques involved or links to further reading in connection with museum exhibits.
  • Many libraries and museums group items in their digital collections into more easily browsable subgroups, for example by era, style, type, or topic.
  • Copyright information is easily available: any limitations to re-using the materials are clearly given. There are also collections that concentrate on items that are in public domain.
  • If digital materials are made available for re-using, often there are multiple formats, sizes, or resolutions. That’s great service!
  • Sets of search results are often smaller than online in general. Finding an answer is faster!
  • Digital collections are created by professionals. While this doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of errors, online materials at libraries and museums are researched, curated, and checked, which increases the reliability of the information provided.
  • If additional information or clarification is needed, it’s the job of museums and libraries to at least try to help. That’s literally why they’re there!

Below are just some amazing digital collections from museums and libraries around the world:

Must. Resist. Internet. Rabbit. Holes!

Image: The Drawbridge via NYPL (The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library, New York Public Library Digital Collections; 1748-1751; etching; by Giovanni Battista Piranesi)

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Travel: Animals

Erik

160222reindeerFrom the grand howdah-backed elephant to the plodding pack pony, from the solitary stallion to the caravan of a thousand camels, animals are often a part of how our characters get around. In previous entries to the travel series we’ve considered small and large groups traveling on foot. This time we bring animals into the mix.

Animals can be useful for travel, but they also bring their own challenges with them. The first thing we need to consider is what kinds of animals are useful for long-distance travel. Then we’ll look at the three main ways of using animals for travel: riding, pack, and draft. Finally, a word on the care and feeding of transport animals. As usual in this series, we are looking at real-world history: no griffins or dragon-drawn chariots. Take the information here and adjust as necessary for whatever setting you happen to be writing.

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Quotes: She Was Born a Thing

Eppu

“She was born a thing and as such would be condemned if she failed to pass the encephalograph test required of all newborn babies. There was always the possibility that though the limbs were twisted, the mind was not, that though the ears would hear only dimly, the eyes see vaguely, the mind behind them was receptive and alert.”

– Anne McCaffrey: The Ship Who Sang

The opening sentence of the titular, first story in the collection.

McCaffrey, Anne: The Ship Who Sang. New York, NY: Del Rey, 1969 [stories originally published between 1961 and 1969], p. 1.

(This quote comes from my 21 new-to-me SFF authors reading project.)

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

Making A Farewell Feast in Bag End

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Here’s a look at how we made yesterday’s Farewell Feast in Bag End.

The menu

  • Fish and chips
  • Boiled cabbage wedges with rosemary mint sauce
  • Blueberry soup

erikchef1As with last month’s party, we have very little to go on in the text for an actual menu. Once again, this requires some imagination, but this time I’m trying to imagine a small, intimate dinner for friends, not a grand party.

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Dining in Middle Earth: A Farewell Feast in Bag End

Eppu

“In the evening Frodo gave his farewell feast: it was quite small, just a dinner for himself and his four helpers… The dining-room was bare except for a table and chairs, but the food was good, and there was good wine: Frodo’s wine had not been included in the sale to the Sackville-Bagginses.”

LotR Dinner2Our take on Frodo’s last dinner in Bag End has Sam Gamgee’s fish and chips at the center, accompanied by boiled cabbage wedges with rosemary mint sauce. For dessert there is a simple blueberry soup. And with it all, a glass of wine for toasting the good old hole farewell.

LotR Dinner2 Simple

Since this is quite a small, pre-long-distance-move dinner, the props are mostly simple, too: plain ceramics, plain glass, and wooden utensils on a bare table. Since the “good wine” was explicitly not included in the sale, we went with the spirit of indulgence and picked a fancier glass for it.

LotR Dinner2 Drink

Check out what’s it about in the introduction, or read the how-to!

Images 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!

Fantasy Religions: Religious Sites

Erik3 Comments

So, you’re creating a fantasy religion for a story or game. When your characters need to interact with their gods, where do they go—if anywhere at all? Down the street to the local temple? To the top of a windswept mountain? To a corner of their kitchen? Today we look at religious sites in historical cultures to inspire our imaginations.

We can start by looking at religion in today’s world. Look at the religious life of a modern western community and you will find some people attending their local church, synagogue, or mosque, some people praying quietly in their own homes, some feeling inspired by solitary walks in the woods, some debating points of theology over the internet, some participating in celebrations of religious holidays, and some not involved at all. Many people will do more than one of the above. No culture or religious tradition is monolithic, and this is just as true in the past as the present. The history of religious expression is one of incredible variety both across and within cultures.

In this variety, though, there are some patterns that recur in varying forms. People use different kinds of religious sites for different  needs. Many different traditions have used similar kinds of religious sites, and within any given tradition different sites are used for different purposes. Today we will look at four common types of religious site out of the wide variety of possibilities: assemblies, temples, household shrines, and natural spaces.

Assembly

The “assembly” type of religious space will be recognizable to anyone familiar with major variants of the modern monotheistic religions. It is a space where a community of believers gathers to perform collective rituals such as praying, singing hymns, hearing sermons, feasting, and witnessing or participating in ritual enactments.

Grand Mosque, Djenne, photograph by BluesyPete via Wikimedia
Grand Mosque, Djenne, photograph by BluesyPete via Wikimedia

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Proud and Prejudiced Zombies

Erik1 Comment

160212ppzI’m really the wrong person to say anything about Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, since I am not a fan of zombie stories to begin with, but having a fondness for Jane Austen I went to the movie hoping for something entertaining. I was not entirely disappointed, but something about the movie bothers me.

It’s not just that it feels like a joke that has gone on too long without getting to a punchline. It is Pride and Prejudice with zombies added, exactly as advertised. The confined and unvarying quality of the movie is a feature, not a bug, and I can live with that. What bothers me about it is what it does to Austen’s characters and in particular the female characters.

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Two Historically-Inspired Recipes to Accompany PPZ

Eppu

Having seen Pride and Prejudice and Zombies last weekend, Regency England is trying to take over my brain. (Braaaain!) Here are two historically-inspired recipes if brains aren’t your favorite dish.

A Charlotte Riley Flickr Yellow pea soup

Pea soup

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings shares a recipe for pease soup (pea soup) by Jane Austen’s longtime friend Martha Lloyd. It comes from Dinner with Mr. Darcy by Pen Vogler. Inspired by the food featured in her novels and letters, the cookbook takes recipes from Austen’s period and adapts them for contemporary cooks.

Ingredients and directions

Take two quarts of pease. Boil them to a pulp. Strain them. Put 1/2 lb of butter into a saucepan. Celery, half an onion, and stew them til tender. Then put two anchovies, powdered pepper, salt, mint and parsley (each a small handful) and spinach, and heat of each a small quantity. Half a spoonful of sugar. The soup be boiled as thick as you like it and the whole be ground together, boiled up and dished.

The mint sounds interesting, but anchovies…?! Visit Brain Pickings for Pen’s modern version of Martha Lloyd’s pea soup and two other recipes. Or take a peak at Amazon’s preview, which includes a few photos from the book, among them four recipes.

Cherries

Cherry bounce

The exact origins of this cherry-infused drink are not known, but it definitely existed towards the end of 18th century, since Martha Washington (1731-1802) had a recipe for it. According to Wikipedia, the village of Frithsden in Hertfordshire claims to have originated it. Since Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is mostly set in Hertfordshire, cherry bounce would make quite a plausible companion to P&P or PPZ.

This recipe is Emily Han’s version, via Design*Sponge:

Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds (680 g) sweet cherries, pitted
4 whole allspice berries
2 whole cloves
1/4 teaspoon ground mace or nutmeg
3/4 cup (144 g) turbinado sugar
1 bottle (750 ml, or 3 1/4 cups) bourbon

Directions

Combine the cherries, allspice, cloves, mace, and sugar in a quart (1 L) jar. Pour the bourbon into the jar, making sure the cherries are submerged. Cap the jar tightly. Store it in a cool, dark place for at least 2 months, shaking occasionally. The longer it infuses, the better it will be. Strain the mixture through a fine-mesh strainer lined with a coffee filter or flour sack cloth, gently pressing on the cherries with the back of a spoon to squeeze out all the liquid. Discard the cherries, or reserve them for another use. Bottle and store in a cool, dark place for up to 1 year. Yields about 3 1/2 cups (823 ml).

A commenter in the Design*Sponge post suggested trying the discarded cherries on ice cream. That does sound yummy! Visit Design*Sponge for another historically-inspired drink recipe by Emily.

Images: Yellow pea soup by A. Charlotte Riley (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Cherries 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!