/snark on

So, for his birthday, I gave the BF a shiny present: the gold edition of Age of Empires III by Ensemble Studios. It included this nifty-looking set of extension called “The War Chiefs”, and “The Asian Dynasties”, which add Native American and Asian civilisations to the game, respectively. Now, the basic principle of AoE III is that each civilisation has a home town, and a great leader: the French have Napoleon, the Ottomans have Suleiman the Magnificent…

And the Aztecs? Well, you can almost imagine the conversation that went on between the developers at Ensemble:

“Ok, we need a war leader for the Aztecs. Someone great, who changed the face of their Empire” *looking over the list of Aztec Emperors* “Darn it, everyone has names of four syllables or more. No gamer is going to have the patience to memorise those.” *looks over the list again* “How about Tizoc?”
“Er, didn’t he only reign five years?”
*dismissive hand* “I’m sure he was cut down in the prime of his glory. Like Alexander the Great. Nah, he should do fine.”

At least, that’s the only reasonable explanation of how we end up with the worst Aztec Emperor in history, the only one who lost his coronation war, barely conquered anything worth mentioning, and died in murky circumstances barely five years after ascending the throne. (poisoning by his own generals or priests was suspected)

*goes bang head against wall*

(not that the Chinese fare any better, since they’re attributed the Kangxi Emperor, who was a Manchu, not a Chinese–but at least you can make a case for his greatness. Tizoc is just… ugh)

/snark over

EDIT: ok, I stand corrected. The game effects a random choice of leader, and does so among a predefined database that includes Tizoc, Cuauhtemoc and Tenoch. It was sheer bad luck that we got Tizoc twice in a row..

Misc.:
-revised a story and lobbed it into the aether
-preparing for VD4, the fourth Villa Diodati workshop, organised in England by Steve Gaskell. Mostly working out my shopping list, since I volunteered to be a cook… (yep, stories to crit, I know. As soon as I’ve worked out who brings the fish sauce…)
-Matthieu and I have booked our hotel and bought our memberships for Worldcon. Which leaves the plane tickets, and other hotels for the non-con part of the trip.
After registering, I took a peek at the seemingly interminable list of current members–and suddenly remembered how bewilderingly huge Interaction had been in 2005. (no, I will not panic, but I did waffle about volunteering to be on the programme…)

Coherency pass on Foreign Ghosts. It looks like it might not be as broken as I feared it was–making a list of all the stuff that’s currently missing, but the basic plot is starting to be reasonably leak-free. At chapter 16 out of 25.

Going to watch a few episodes of Chevalier D’Eon now, a decidedly odd anime set in France during the reign of Louis XV. Gorgeous backdrops, but obviously done by someone who had very little idea of the history of Paris–for instance, the obelisk of La Concorde was brought back by Napoleon, about 50 years after Louis XV; the big, large airy streets are Haussman, about 150 years later… But it’s still fun, in a very Japanese way (brother-sister uncomfortably close relationship? check. Creepy magic that takes more out of you than it gives you? check).

I do love the fact that religion is so omnipresent, though, and that D’Eon’s faith is so important (major pet peeve of mine: having religion thought of as weird, nonsensical, or as a science, in an era where Cartesian thought was either not developed or in its infancy, and where belief was widespread).

The Thousand Hand Guanyin (Qian Shou Guan Yin): it would be impressive for any kind of dancers, but consider that all 21 performers of this are all deaf-mute deaf… Just imagining the sheer  amount of rehearshals involved boggles the mind.

(on other videos, you can see that they have white-dressed coordinators standing to the side, and they can of course refer to each other for the moves, but still… that remains one of the most impressive feats of coordinations I’ve seen. )

(from Mary Robinette Kowal)

“TGIF” is pretty much the only word that can be applied to the week. I’m exhausted, and all ready for the marathon Saturday afternoon with friends

Link-salad:

-The Hugo Voter Packet is now live, courtesy of John Scalzi. There’s great stuff in there, six novels (four of the Hugo nominees, the scaringly good Acacia and Thunderer by fellow Campbell nominees David Anthony Durham and Felix Gilman. Also short fiction samples from Tony Pi, Gord Sellar, and yours truly (a samplet of the stuff I put up on my website). You have to be a member of Anticipation to download it–but isn’t all this nifty stuff worth the price of admission? 

-Speaking of the Campbell… congratulations to David Anthony Durham for being selected as part of the newest crop of Wild Cards writers. 

-Last Campbell stuff, I promise Mary Robinette Kowal has finished interviewing all five of us on her blog. 

-J. Cheney has a good story up at Fantasy Magazine, “Early Winter, Near Jenli Village“, and a nifty interview done by Marshall Payne.

-Stephanie Burgis on why agents matter, and her moving account of the genesis of her Regency YA trilogy (which, incidentally, is near the top of my books to order)

-World Tea Expo : wow, I’m salivating… (via teafreaks)

BF and I are still deep into the Canada guide, trying to work out what we’re going to do before Anticipation (looks like there’s more than enough around Montreal to keep us busy for a while). 

Off to spend some time with Hamster Sister (she had a bunch of  wisdom teeth removed–some swelling happened, obviously…)

And, oops, too busy with the website tweaking to think of posting that…

A Basic Introduction to Chinese Mythology and Folklore, at the Nebula Awards Website (with thanks to Charles Tan and Nancy Fulda).

“Dancing for the Monsoon” now up on Abyss & Apex (thanks to Wendy Delmater and the inimitable Kelly Green). This was my Bootcamp story–infinitely improved with the great feedback I received there. Thanks as well to the BF, and to Marshall Payne, who both convinced me not to throw it away.

Sharing a TOC with Villa Diodati Beloved Dictator Ruth Nestvold. Awesome!

Nanpeng watched her student Khean practise for the Great Dance in the courtyard, her lithe body swaying to the rhythm of the xylophones. Each of Khean’s hand gestures naturally flowed into the next; her body bent smoothly, without visible stress. Khean’s face under the golden headdress was, as proper for a dancer, expressionless, but no tiredness appeared either in her eyes or in her gestures.

Khean was good. Extraordinarily good, and fearless as well. That mattered very much for a dancer, especially one about to enter the Great Dance, the dance that would bring the monsoon rain but leave the dancer utterly paralysed. Nanpeng was proud of her student.

Serey, the High Priest of the Destroyer, stood to Nanpeng’s side, his eyes watching every gesture Khean made.

“Only two days left before the Great Dance,” he said. His almond eyes turned, briefly, to Nanpeng.

“Yes,” Nanpeng said. “You sound worried.”

Serey kept watching the courtyard, where the musicians played under the eyes of the numerous statues of the gods. No, Nanpeng realised with a pang of fear. Serey was watching Khean.

Read more.

I think it says something about me that I come home late and tired (having had 3 minutes of lunch pause, since lunch was spent in a meeting room with some sandwiches), and that to relax, I tweak the CSS of my website and do some edits…

(not sure I want to know what)

It hasn’t been a very good week: J. G. Ballard died, as well as Ken Rand, two people who will be much missed in their own way. I’ve had other bad news from other people I know.

The good news is that we spent a very nice BF’s birthday, with homemade pear cake (look, Mum, I can cook ), that we’re looking at the Insight Guide for Canada and planning our travel around Worldcon.

Other good news is that my short story “Horus Ascending” has made the list of notable 2008 stories over at the Million Writers Award. There’s a lot of familiar names on the list: Beth Bernobich, Mary Robinette Kowal, Cat Rambo, Eric James Stone, John Brown, Jim Hines, Lavie Tidhar, Eugie Foster, Charles Coleman Finlay and Rae Carson Finlay, Ken Scholes.. Wow. And special heads-up to Beneath Ceaseless Skies, which was mentioned as the runner-up for best new magazine and racked up two nominations despite its late 2008 start.

Ok, I’m temporarily leaving this as it is–it’s readable and reasonably clean, and I have a novel to get back to
BF and I went to see “Three Kingdoms” this weekend: John Woo’s retelling of the Battle of Red Cliffs. Basically, peplum made in China, with a pretty good cast, awesome visuals and a storyline that, if not original, does turn out to be fairly gripping.

My only gripe was being unable to follow everyone’s names (I had totally forgotten who Liu Bei was by the end of the movie, which is kind of ironic when he’s supposed to be one of the main characters of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the events on which the movie is based): for a Westerner, it’s not so easy to tell apart about a dozen Chinese people apart–all introduced at the start of the movie, all sporting more-or-less identical haircuts and having more-or-less the same bearded countenance. We later discovered that we’d only seen the abridged version: the full movie is a two-parter of 4 hours instead of the 2.5 we were shown. I’d be really interested to track down the full (Asian) version and see how it holds up. Maybe those extra characters do stick in the mind with double the screentime available.

Oh, also, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who plays Sun Quan’s general Zhou Yu, one of the two main characters in the movie, is fast becoming one of our favorite actors (he also played in Hero and Lust, Caution, both times to great effect).

OK, so I’m cautiously moving into the “open to public consumption” phase…

I’ve finally got the motivation for moving my entire website to WordPress: http://www.aliettedebodard.com. I’m a php and WordPress novice, so not everything might be lined up yet. I’ve worked out the livejournal crossposting, at least…

What do you think? Feedback very much welcome, though I can’t promise I’ll be capable of taking everything into account, since all I did was tweaking the colour scheme of an existing theme…

PS: incidentally, does anyone know how to create a nifty contact form?
(thanks, David!)
PS: monkeying around with colour schemes, so everything might look wonky for a while…