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the various and sundry creations of sylvus tarn
22may2013
So the wizard got Elspeth Cooper's Songs of the Earth: The Wild Hunt (Book I) from the library, liked it, and wanted to know my opinion.
Well, I finished it in a couple of days (still coming off the tail-end of three weeks or so of inactivity) and my quick summary is that Songs is a quite serviceable high fantasy—it's just the sort of thing my brother-in-law would enjoy; it would appeal, I think to folks who like Lackey or McCaffrey (though there are no magical animal companions); it reminds me a bit of McKillip's Riddlemaster of Hed, and some other series of books with dragon bones, featuring a male protagonist and a sister on an estate I can't recall (um, Patricia Brigg's Dragon Bones, thank you google).
It's not actively sexist or racist, but it's kind of disappointing to see such outdated roles for everyone; the plot is also fairly predictable, but for the spoiler-averse the rest of this critique should land behind the cut.
18may2013
Oh man, carpal tunnel sucks. That along with lateral epicondylitis, is why I've gotten so little done. So, since I can't do useful stuff, I've been collecting linkspam...
- An interesting paper explaining why genetics and heritability are not the same thing (via the comments of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ horde );
- A fun post about an old book of household hints (because this is the sort of stuff so useful for would-be writers of (alternate) historical fiction;
- Another historical post via boing-boing, but what really got my attention were the other linkies to cool old documents at the bottom...oh my, what a treasure trove this site appears to be;
7may2013
It's that time of year again, when the ubuntu folks roll out the new distro; which means the wizard upgraded the box I make these posts on; also thought I might like a new default browser, rekonq. Which is a kind and sweet thought, except I'm used to chrome, and what's more, all my bookmarks are on chrome, as well as my favorites, plus this cute little extension that allows me edit these pages using emacs.
—All that stuff: gone. And the wizard wonders why I hate change.
Among other things I was supposed to test were the various tools I use for making these webpages, and everything does appear to be working—bonus: lost all my ranty links, thus you're spared. Except this one for the three fen-created vulcan fonts which I remembered enough to find again. I originally stumbled across it via a clearinghouse for all sorts of fonts (which of course is buried in my chrome links, and that no doubt via some discussion on languagelog...) and I just think it is too cool. What the fen did was take set designers/artist renditions from the various movies/shows and then organize them into three quite different looking fonts that nevertheless do have a visual relationship to each other: formal, print and handwritten, more or less.
2may2013
Yesterday I didn't feel good, so I spent some time looking up quilting techniques. This is because the little bags I've been making are basically three-dimentional quilts, and my piecing sucks (fortunately the designs are pretty forgiving.) But I thought it might be useful to learn how to do it right, so I did a bit of research.
I think I'll probably want to check out this book on paper piecing. It does seem a bit counterintuitive to be stitching fabric to paper, or discarding half your triangles just so everything comes out ‘perfect’ (because you actually have to cut one to two thread widths, in much the way woodworkers must account for the width of sawblades—talk about precision!—to get properly sized pieces).
1may2013
So while I sat, zoned in front of the computer, waiting for aspirin to kick in, I stumbled across this post on women programmers in Open Source:
Work with scraps. I get anxious over wasting food or cloth or paper, so when I cook or sew or write stand-up comedy or poetry, I feel more comfortable working with scraps, with leftovers. When I am scribbling ideas for stand-up bits, I prefer to use textfiles that already have miscellaneous jottings in them, or little half-full notebooks, or odd-shaped scratch paper. No doubt my preference for pre-ruined materials reflects my perfectionism and anxiety over worth. I can be creative more easily if the materials were just going to go to waste anyway. I think the trick to addressing this mindset, in the long run, includes habits of deemphasizing and subtlety, tricking oneself into not making a big production out of any given attempt. I’m not good at that. But in the short term: scraps.
30apr2013
Sorry about the lack of posting. Turns out when I'm bizzy bizzy bizzy making the art, I haven't got much time to post about it (as it is, this is something I dragged out of the queue...)
But I did think this quote was interesting, when I spotted it last week:
We got a fair amount of flak from students last time around who were frustrated when labs didn’t work like a recipe from a cookbook — yet that’s how science usually proceeds, with lots of tinkering and frustration and repetition.
I have vivid memories of labs not going well when I was in school. It took me a long time to internalize the importance of the journey, rather than merely copying/reproducing results. (Also, I got terribly dehydrated, and then sleepy and frustrated—for obvious reasons, they don't really want you consuming stuff in biology (let alone chemistry) labs. One of my profs suggested taking breaks during our 4-hour labs. I looked at him, owl-eyed. You could do that?)
