krylyr

Turns out the episode of Superspiff and the Toothpick Kid early yesterday morning had some...editing issues in it.  Mostly you get to hear me say something like bleewagjalblah (which is the sound I make after I've inserted my foot in my mouth), reread a sentence, then rewrite and read the rewritten sentence.  So I pulled it this morning, and will re-post it tonight.  Sorry!

On the bright side, I got the podcast promo script written and sent out.  So, that's a plus.  Also, going to knock out some more Fallen Horizon today. 

maryrobinette

At Readercon, someone asked me if I had ever made a puppet show from one of my stories.  Two.  Sort of.  Beauty Will Come is something I did for Pixel-Stained Technopeasant day last year and is not really a puppet show, though it might look like one for a moment.

I used toy theater technique to create moving illustrations for an audio story.  If it were a true puppet show, I’d have cut the narration and shown with action rather than words.  Still, it’s the closest thing I’ve got recorded.

I’ve written for stage, but always adapting someone else’s work.  My only original script was for Willamette Radio Workshop’s Murder of Crows.  Huh. I just remembered that Shades of Milk and Honey started as a radio script for a serial.

The other puppet show from my fiction is a monologue by a talking dinosaur, which was a short I wrote in first person, so it was kind of a no brainer about adapting it for stage. Most of my short fiction is ill-suited to puppetry either because it’s an all human cast or because there are too many scenic locations to work for stage. Hm… Evil Robot Monkey and Clockwork Chickadee are the only ones that I can think of that might make the transition. Everything else? Too many people and very little reason to need puppets.

the_flea_king

What are some of you favorite 1980s bad genre films?  Examples might include Weird Science, Willow, Krull, Flash Gordon... I leave it up to the individual to define “bad” and “favorite.”    I’m making a list, but I want to make sure I don’t forget any.  Please help, Obi won Livejournal. You’re my only hope.

Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.

the_flea_king

Originally published at JeremiahTolbert.com. You can comment here or there.

whafford

Usually with big stones like this, the workers bring in sledgehammers and break it up to take away in pieces, but on top of this precipice that wasn't going to work. I called Fuad over to make sure the workers understood what I wanted and to ask them if it could be done safely. Fuad’s English is good and Arabic is his native language, so if things get in a crunch, I use him as a translator. The workers said it could be done; I’d expected them to say that, but I wanted to emphasize that there should be no showboating and that we had to do this carefully and safely. They cleared all the soils from around the block and cut a bit from the walls to make sure it was ready to be moved. Then they shifted part of the stone and brought in ropes to get underneath it. Then they shifted it again and finally got the ropes beneath.

As they pulled, the stone ground upwards, toward the higher block to the south. It took four people pulling on the ropes and Ismaien came to help as well. He is a bit more flambouyant than the others and almost caused the whole thing to topple, but but the more level-headed Hassan stopped him and saved the day. Eventually they were able to pull the stone up and out of the way. It had taken a lot of time but we got the block moved safely and I could have them start to cut down into the strata below.

Moving the double block of the lower threshold was comparatively easy and then we cut farther down in stages, creating a short set of stairs here. Unfortunately, we didn’t find a foundation deposit so we still don’t know what god this temple was dedicated to and we still have no written word from anywhere in the site. Of course, there is some packing material left beneath the western most portion of the threshold since we left a bit as part of the staircase. It would be quite frustrating if there was a foundation deposit right in that small area we left.

The stair cut was quick going after the threshold block had come up. There were no finds at all here, though, most of the material beneath was the clean packing laid at the time of founding the temple. After the stairs were cut, I moved the workers up to Op 42 to complete work there. I wanted to get down to a large ash layer visible in the old Op 42 baulk and we only had one more day where we’d have a full crew of workers. Most of our students and supervisors were scheduled to leave on the 30th and so we would need a travel day on the 29th and would have to close the dig completely by the 28th. But in fact, Michael and I would have to speak with the officials in Damascus before we left and we wanted to be there on the 28th for a meeting in which we would turn in our preliminary report, pay the site guard and inspector’s salary, and other administrative duties that had to be taken care of. So we would probably close the site on the 27th. That still left 25 with workers and 26 with just us on the tell completing section drawings, trench photos, and final documentation.

I spent much of my time examining the overall temple cut. Making sense of the layers here had been one of my primary goals of the season and now I finally had the exposure I needed. Naturally we had paid attention to the layers as we cut down through them, separating lots whenever a change in soil was noted, but now I could look still more closely at those changes in a vertical section and try to understand what was going on.

In the far north was the set of burned layers that made up Locus 321. These often made U shapes, pushed up against something on both sides. Above them, however, were layers of harder material, brick-like and clay. These layers sloped down to the south, severely in some cases, and ended against more brick fall in the middle of the cut. This was also where the curved plaster lines were noted in the floor. Something was definitely here. Individual bricks, though, were hard to make out. Some were clear enough near the ash layers, and these slumped inward, falling into the ash in places but making an overall dome of sorts surrounding the ash. To the south, layers flattened out somewhat and in the far south, near the doorway, bricks were much clearer and I was able to follow them in their laid format. Here had probably been a wall originally, but most of it was not in the unit, only in the SW corner. North of that, there were bricks but in good placement. This was wall fall and when it fell it probably landed atop and against the domed structure in the north.

Michael and I spent the afternoon discussing what it could all mean. We looked carefully at the stratigraphy and the scale drawing I’d made of it all, spraying a mist of water on the wall to bring out the differences in color and texture more clearly. We knew there were three floors in the south and central areas, all covered with ash, heavy in places. The highest floor ended against the curved plaster lines and these were probably part of the outside of the domed feature in the north. It was a long way from the curve to the ash, however, (about 2 meters) and the ash seemed to be the center of the dome. Indeed, we deduced it could only be a very large oven.

Domed ovens are still common in the Middle East. They are used to bake bread and cook other foodstuffs. In fact, the word for such an oven is tanoor and we use this word for most burning/cooking features. But some tanoors are quite large, and often are found in courtyards (due to the smoke they create, they are not often inside buildings). Could this northern area have been an exterior space in the mid-third millennium? After the walls nearby collapsed, the whole area was leveled and packed down to put a small version of the temple atop. Inside this temple, pits were dug (for the storage of grain?) Then, with the second floor of the temple, walls were expanded to the north and a good deal of rebuilding occurred. Finally, the third floor of the temple was put down, covering the pits completely and this final version burned around 2150BC.

jaylake

Jonathan Strahan comments passim on Green and Escapement [ Powell's | Amazon ] — He asks a question I’ve wondered about myself. Also, bonus kenscholes mentioned.

“Mind Meld” from SF Signal on worldbuilding — In which I was invited to play.

will-couvillier with news about the return of James Gunn’s online writing workshop — Go check it out.

Mary Robinette Kowal builds me a new colon — She has the technology. She will make me stronger than I was before.

Cake Wrecks — Hahahahahah. (Thanks to danjite.)

APOD with another astonishing image of Martian terrain — The post is titled “High Cliffs Surrounding Echus Chasma on Mars.” I want to put a city in that crater.

Global Warming distortion from the right wing noise machine — An overview at Cocktail Party Physics (Hat tip to Bad Astronomy Blog, which has been on a roll lately.)

The US Military’s sleep reduction program — (Hat tip to Freakonomics.)

7/23/08
Time in saddle: n/a (20 minute walk instead)
Last night’s weigh-out: n/a
This morning’s weigh-in: n/a
Currently reading: Green by Jay Lake

Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.

jaylake

Last night I dreamt that ericjamesstone and I were hanging out. (Which would be fun if it happened IRL.) We’d had lunch and gone walking in a greenspace on a college campus, talking politics. He went to his car to get something, and I was mugged by a drunk homeless guy and his dog while Eric was gone. I was mortally afraid this idiot would punch me in the gut, where my surgical seam is, so I ran into a classroom building, where I met Vonda McIntyre. Moments later I was in a seminar room full of Pacific Northwest writers — brendacooper, Jim Fiscus, Jerry Oltion, a bunch of other folks. I’d been scheduled to moderate a panel on shared world building, and was utterly unprepared, and even unaware.

Is this the writer equivalent of the college anxiety dream about having to take the final exam for the class you thought you’d dropped before the semester started? I woke up laughing at myself.

Originally published at jlake.com. You can comment here or there.