HSU IT Department

For some reason I seem to be on a Russia roll at the moment...

The Library of Congress has a new online exhibit of a whole collection of beautiful color images from Russia -- which date from 30+ years before color photos were actually possible! The first color film (Kodachrome) came out in 1936, but a Russian photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii came up with a way to create color images (though not print them) way back in the late 1800s/early 1900s. He had the idea of taking three black and white photos of a subject -- one through a red filter, one through a green and one through a blue -- and then back at home he would project the three negatives together, each one through the appropriate filter, onto a white sheet or wall. (His projector looks a bit like a stoplight, with three lenses.) The blended RGB light created color images, just like it does on TVs or computers today. Pretty amazing!

The Library of Congress has his negatives and they've created color prints from the RGB negatives. The photos are GORGEOUS -- this page of the exhibit has some of the best ones with the lushest colors (the Emir of Bukhara has a particularly lively robe). The main page for the exhibit has a bunch of information about the photographer and a detailed explanation of his process as well as the process the LOC used to create the color images for the exhibit.

Go. Look. Marvel.

Hating Irene. Hating the Weather Channel. Hating most comprehensively all those hyper-alarmist people who caused Amtrak to go spastic and cancel trains. Not only was I forced to be a no-show for a conference panel I was supposed to be chairing, but (WAY more importantly) I had to cut short my vacation with my mom, meaning that I didn't get to eat here or see this. To add insult to injury, we were tied in Scrabble four games to four, and now we'll never know who's Queen of the Universe.

Curse you, weather gods!!!!

I've always liked this movie (Joan Crawford and Eve Arden) and only found out recently that it was based on a book, so of course had to read it. It wasn't really what I expected -- in some ways it was better than the movie, in others worse. Better in that we get a fuller explanation of why Veda is the way she is, and why her mother puts up with it, but worse in that Mildred comes off as much stupider. The ending is completely different from the movie, much less dramatic; it ends -- literally -- not with a bang but a whimper. Cain apparently also wrote Double Indemnity (another favorite movie of mine) and The Postman Always Rings Twice. His writing isn't anything terrific -- the characters are two-dimensional and cliche, for the most part; maybe that's why they did better as movies where that doesn't matter so much. Bottom line: meh. May have to see the Winslet version, just so I can compare.

Well, obviously this was AWESOME, since I finished Name of the Wind on the 7th and this on the 9th. OK, it was actually 2am on the 10th. A. Ma. Zing. But Patrick, Patrick, how can you keep us waiting until May 2012???? Especially when you said they were all done????

The Pacific Northwest secedes and forms a new country, Ecotopia, based on a steady-state (i.e., sustainable) model rather than the perpetual-growth model that is capitalism. A journalist from the U.S. on an official visit writes columns on various aspects of Ecotopian society: education, health care, working habits, sex, etc. The book's 1970s roots show through in places, particularly in race and gender attitudes, but taken all in all it's an interesting piece of work.

The book alternates between the narrator's personal journal kept during the trip and the columns he files with his newspaper back in the U.S., so you get both facts and personal experiences/interpretation. The Ecotopian solutions to problems like pollution, unemployment, welfare etc. are presented somewhat simplistically, but the author's intent was simply to suggest plausible alternative modes of thinking about success, progress, happiness, love, work, and so on, not to lay out a detailed blueprint of how to execute it. By and large I think he succeeds, if not with the elegance of his predecessor Sir Thomas More. (Speaking of which, did you know that the full title of More's Utopia is "A Truly Golden Little Book, No Less Beneficial Than Entertaining, of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia" ? Quite a mouthful.)

I'm not sure how workable some of the ideas are (people quit work at the drop of a hat to have a beer-and-pot party, for example, yet somehow they're productive enough they only need to work 20 hours a a week) but they're all thought-provoking. Whether the hippy-dippy laid-back attitudes that he describes would be capable of producing the new technology that Ecotopia relies on is debatable, but it's refreshing to be shown another worldview to contrast with our mass-produced, mass-marketed, over-commercialized worship of more/bigger/faster, particularly after the last decade of Double Plus Ungood events (9/11, two wars, economic collapse, etc.). Bottom line: definitely a book with an agenda, not great literature, but an interesting read that should stimulate your little gray cells.

In other news, I've started on Patrick Rothfuss' The Name of the Wind, and holy #@&*^ is it good. So well-written that you almost immediately forget you're reading and feel rather that you're living it, seeing events with your own eyes. It's rare writing that goes straight into you like that without, apparently, passing through the eyes or requiring translation by the brain. I'm in awe of his skill.

I very nearly gave up on this, due to fear of anticipated witch/vampire paranormal-romance cheesiness, and had it not been for the luscious descriptions of Duke Humfrey's reading room at the Bodleian, old manuscripts, food and wine, I might have bailed early on. But perseverance was rewarded: the author came through in terms of plot and I'm glad I stuck with it, because it turned out to be quite good. Some of the romance is, I freely admit, indeed a bit cheesy -- the male lead really needs to stop growling and purring -- and after the horror that was Twilight I have very little patience for the "I want you desperately but we cannot have sex now, we must wait until it's PERFECT" nonsense, but in the end these were minor quibbles in light of the intriguing plot. A plot, I might add, which manages to combine witches, vampires, demons, alchemy, secret crusader societies, and just about every magical power known to witch-kind. Not to mention some supremely good descriptions of wine (she said, smacking her lips).

The main character's irritating Mary Sue-wimp-ness ("No no no, I don't want to be a witch, I don't want to be magic" -- what are you, NUTS, woman??!??) does at last get explained in relatively credible terms. I suspect that in book 2 (forthcoming) she'll be a much stronger person, since there are some strong female characters, the best being Matthew's mother Ysabeau; when she faces down her other son, Baldwin, it's quite a scene. The Bishop House turns out to be a pretty strong character itself; I love the way it creates new bedrooms and spits out useful items as needed.

The intertwining of alchemy and genetics, magic and evolution, past and present are engrossing, and a nice change from the fluff that makes up most vampire/witch/demon fiction in these degenerate days. I'm looking forward to Book 2.

I'd post something witty, but it's Wednesday and I have nothing to say. Instead I will share this truly epicly (epically?) HILARIOUS animated Harrey Podder cartoon. All I can say to this is "Bwahahahahaaaaaa!"

[Error: unknown template video]

Our local Ren Fest opened this weekend, huzzah!!! Of course we went, of course we got all dressed up for it, of course we ate turkey drumsticks and drank ale at 10am and sang silly songs and generally had an awesome time. And of course we bought new garb.

Yes, it's only the FIRST DAY and we've already heavily indulged our garbaholic weakness. This does not bode well for our pocketbook for the rest of the season. Spouse has been complaining that he looks like he's slumming when he's with me since I go for the wench look while he goes for the Sir Walter Raleigh look (apart, thank gods, from the ruff that makes you look like a bird who swallowed a plate). So I gave in and got a gorgeous chocolate-brown velvet surcoat over a cream underskirt, with a new shirt to boot. Of course that meant Spouse had to upgrade as well: he picked up a new silk taffeta doublet that looks great and is ten times lighter than the heavier one he's been wearing.

We look fabulous. Except now I need a hat and some accessories. Oh what a shame.

On another note, I apparently qualify for AP History level nerdiness due to the fact that at least one of our cats is named for mythological/defunct or pre-modern era deities. I'm not sure about the other one, but they don't have a category for Greek superhero so I'm going to assume she'd qualify us for this category as well.

Translated from the Russian, this book first relates the events of LoTR as seen from the other side (Mordorians, orcs, Haradrim, etc.) and then segues into What Happens After (conspiracy, espionage, secret missions, etc.)

It's probably a good idea to read the author's essay on Salon.com before tackling this book. He's a Russian palaeontologist and wrote it because he was puzzling over some geological oddities of Middle Earth -- e.g., single continent but no mid-continent mountain range, and also what's on the rest of the map south and east of Morder that you never see?? (There's also another good article on salon.com that preceded the author's piece.)

The first part, where LoTR is recapped from the Mordorians' perspective, was interesting and rather creative (who knew it was all a plot by the elves to take over Middle Earth??), but then it turns into a military/spy thriller dealing with the quest to destroy Galadriel's mirror and send the elves back where they came from. At that point I got bored with it, since spy thrillers aren't a genre I like. f you like Tolkien, military-oriented fantasy, and John Le Carre & Co., you'll probably enjoy it. Since I only like the first of those three things, I didn't get much out of it and in fact didn't finish it.

Some people have suggested it's fanfic, but I'm not sure it qualifies as that since it's actually been published and won a couple of awards in Russia. The translation was done as a labor of love by ymarkov in his spare time, just because they thought it was interesting, so no professional editing, which it would have benefited from -- for example, the tense shifts all over the place, which drove me crazy. Presumably it isn't this way in the award-winning original Russian.

Worth reading, particularly if you write fantasy as well as read it, is another essay that the author mentions in his piece on salon.com, by another Russian fantasy author and critic. It's called "Must Fantasy Be Stupid?" and is an exploration of why so many fantasy authors seem to think their readers are idiots, or are willing to pretend to be idiots. His scathing attack on authors who create special one-off rules solely for the purpose of being able to do something they need/want to do in their story, like making lava flow uphill, is pretty funny ("well, in general lava always flows under the incline, but in this place of the Earth there is a geomagnetic anomaly, connected with sunken Atlantis, because of which..."). I couldn't find an English version, but the article in the original Russian is here and you can use babelfish to get a comprehensible, though exceedingly rough, translation into English.

Oh look! I can finally log in again. The LJ gremlins have been hard at work on my account (no matter how many times I logged in successfully, when I went to any entry in my OWN journal, it showed me as not logged in -- very weird) but apparently they're all sleeping it off now and I can get in. Yay! So I have a book recommendation and a funny video to share.

First the book: Idlewild by Nick Sagan, son of Carl "billyuns and billyuns" Sagan. Intriguing and highly original: braids together AI, virtual reality, post-plague-apocalypse, adolescent rebellion and more into a strange and unusual tale that keeps you guessing, wondering what's real and what isn't. In some ways it previews ideas played out in the movie Inception, in that there are layers within layers of things going on. Although you're uncertain what's happening a lot of the time, the author doles out information at a proper pace so you're intrigued and drawn on, rather than frustrated, and some of the small details (the mail bag of letters, for example) are very powerful. I didn't find the ending completely satisfying -- it was fitting and appropriate, by no means bad or wrong, it's just that I wasn't done with the characters and wanted to know what happened next. Fortunately, it turns out there are two sequels, Edenborn and Everfree, so I shall have to get right on them. Three cheers for not having to wait for sequels!!

Now for the video. Meet Amy Walker, accent artist extraordinaire. She can do any accent on the planet (her YouTube channel, amiablewalker has lots more) but this is one of my personal faves:

[Error: unknown template video]