sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
For nearly the first time since the Cape, I slept. It required me to spend hours after midnight waiting for my body to get the unconsciousness memo and then repeat the process this morning after a doctor's office called back at the crack of business, but construction has been precluded by the recurrent nor'easter rain and it worked. The dreams were nothing to write home about, but at least I had them. And then we had a mild power outage, but still. Sleep! I could get used to it.

unpopular opinions

Oct. 30th, 2025 06:02 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
Saying that the creative process of creation/conception for a story/novel MUST START with character/goal/motivation is complete fucking nonsense. You will usually need it in the END PRODUCT (modulo weird edge cases like Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men), but that doesn't have to be the inception.

cf. composing music, where this would be like saying to a composer: you MUST ALWAYS start FIRST with a melody or you MUST ALWAYS start FIRST with a harmonic progression or you MUST ALWAYS start FIRST with instrumentation etc. No??? You can start in any of a number of places and still wind up with music???

There are times you need to start with $XYZ because of the use case (if writing for a string quartet, that constrains your instrumentation, ranges, techniques).

But when writing music, I can START in ANY of these places (not a complete list) (and have done so at various points):

- instrumentation
- tempo
- time signature
- harmonic progression
- a rhythm
- a vibe
- key/mode/etc
- melody or leitmotif
- structure/form (e.g. theme and variations, ternary form)
- a transformation (e.g. diminution, retrograde)
- articulation(s) to feature
- trolling ("What if I rewrote Swan Lake's theme in 5/4?")
etc

You're not going to be able to tell which one from the RESULTING MUSIC as an end product.

For that matter, watching web/comic creators talk about story ideation is fascinating. A bunch of them start with "I drew this cool character, but who are they? what is their story?", which is absolutely not my process since I don't visualize, but it's a perfectly cromulent process!

[music] Trailures and Other Fiascoes

Oct. 29th, 2025 10:18 pm
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
I committed a mini-album on Bandcamp of Trailures and Other Fiascoes (= "failure trailers"). Hybrid orchestra instrumental music because mopey foxmoth can't sing.

(I know voice lessons exist but for medical reasons, sore throat for over a year; singing is contraindicated.)



(This is accumulated composition/production from the past few months; I'm bowing out of a bunch of things currently due to ongoing health stuff. I don't want to discuss health details further, thanks!)

emotional support dyeing?

Oct. 29th, 2025 10:43 am
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
hand-dyed handspun yarn

A test batch to see how the colors come out. Next I start measuring out and doing this more systematically.

Three-ply handspun wool yarn.
sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
[personal profile] sovay
The construction turned out not to be on an adjacent street; we were misled by it not being roadwork. It is the re-roofing of a house diagonally across our street and we have no idea how many days it will last except two is already more than enough. I can't believe we are still afflicted with construction, it just changed levels. I wanted to do anything with my brain this evening and fell asleep instead. On the bright side, it occurred to me to look into the current whereabouts of the members of my beloved Schmekel, the short-lived and brilliant, all-trans, all-Jewish klezmer-punk band that gave the world such gems as "I'll Be Your Maccabee" (2010)" and "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur" (2011) and discovered that while the keyboardist has remained a musician, the bassist went into the medical profession, the guitarist became an award-winning game designer, and as of last year the drummer is the rabbi of a congregation in western Massachusetts, which is great. Any mention of Martin Buber will to this day instantly earworm me with "FTM at the DMV" (2013).
sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey: passion)
[personal profile] sovay
As part of my birthday month, [personal profile] spatch just presented me with a little black cat bag containing the Criterion flash sale fruits of Orson Welles' The Immortal Story (1968), which I had loved at the start of this month.



I just want an extra week in the month to do nothing but sleep instead of talking to doctors and bureaucracies. I can't believe we are almost out of October. It should be an inexhaustible resource.

Trying my best to arrive

Oct. 27th, 2025 12:19 pm
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
This morning was marked by construction on a loudly adjacent street, a constant window-juddering for hours from which I finally managed to fall asleep just in time to wake up for my doctor's apppointment. The amount of sleep on which I have run this last week is not sufficient to sustain intelligence. This meme I stole from [personal profile] foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988).

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas' Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016).

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946–59).

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009).

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.

Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.
sovay: (Psholtii: in a bad mood)
[personal profile] sovay
I know it is no longer news in the ravenous cycle of horrors that passes for the front page these days, but the fact that the man in the White House took a literal wrecking ball to it feels once again so unnecessarily on the nose, at least if it were satire I could be laughing. I know buildings are not human lives such as this administration ends and ruins with such pleasure of ownership, but the roses of the concrete-choked garden were real things, not just symbols, and so were the bricks and the tiles of the East Wing. I have nothing revelatory to say about this particular destruction in the midst of so much more personal violence except that I didn't want to let it slide into a tacit shrug, as if it were an ordinary exercise of presidential powers, another rock through the Overton window. Or a bulldozer.
sovay: (PJ Harvey: crow)
[personal profile] sovay
In fairness to June Lockhart, the first time I ever saw her she was sharing the same episode of Babylon 5 (1994–98) as Londo's card-sharping tentadicks and the latter seared themselves rather more indelibly into my brain, but with less than five minutes of her own in T-Men (1947) she stole far more of the film for me, so much that even knowing that a century is a graceful point to depart from, I am still sorry the world no longer contains her and all of her time. She moved from film to television so early that I always wondered if she had been blacklisted like Marsha Hunt, but the answer looks like not. I loved finding out about her tastes in rock music and my experience of her most famous and long-running roles was almost nil. It means I remember her, perhaps unfairly, twenty-two years old and looking like the fair-haired avatar of all the white picket fences in the world, coming effortlessly up to speed on their shadows. She should have worked with David Lynch.

Database maintenance

Oct. 25th, 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

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