sheep shearing

I spent a little more than 48 hours in Flagstaff the other weekend. gorgeous weather. wonderful wool and fiber festival (even if my very favorite vendor couldn't be there this year). also, as always, the most excellent traveling companions. so grateful to those lovely humans. 

on Sunday, the last day of the festival, I spent 3 hours teaching a little lacemaking workshop and it was wonderful! just 6 enthusiastic students, plenty of time, plus friend Shannon helping out as unofficial assistant, and it all went so well. I'm so glad everyone came ready to learn and practice and struggle with the weirdness that is tatting and tatted lace. I hope they all keep going with it. and maybe some of them will join The Lace Coven too.

the days since then have felt like a dragging two-dimensional swamp, somehow. I think I need more rest.

since summer 2024 I've been prioritizing the whole weekend of Flag Wool, every June, for a getaway with fiber friends. (this year the festival dates conflicted with my favorite academic conference and I confess it was not quite a difficult choice even though I do miss Computers & Writing and all its fun community a good bit.) a different house rental each time. some shuffling of who attends. so much gratitude that I get to be included in the fun. 

at some point along the way I was handed a copy of this book, The Lost Flock, by Jane Cooper. a meandering autobiographical style, very well researched, and fascinating to read. will I ever find myself tending sheep on a remote Scottish island? highly unlikely. more than happy to read about it though. storms and mud and diseases and all, it sounds pretty romantic.

 

the book cover itself (not to mention the setting and the sheep and the land and all that too) reminded me of Pratchett's The Wee Free Men.

sheep and shepherds. cheese and fleece. community and stories. the books are not that similar at all but you can see the echoes across the two covers I'm sure. blue sky or sea. green hills. close-up on a fleecy sheep with beady ovine eyes. more fleecy sheep wandering the hills in the background.  

I don't reread books that often, but maybe I'll revisit these two again sometime soon. the whole Tiffany Aching series is splendid and poignant and worthy of deep attention. maybe I should acquire a boxed set of them. hmmm.

has anyone in the world of the wee free men considered teaching them how to perfectly shear a sheep? I can't remember.

sheep shearing is a dying art, they say. a strange little niche profession, so delicate and demanding. too bad we don't have any magical little dudes to help out with it. sometimes I wonder if I would or could ever learn. such a prospect feels almost as far-fetched though, most days. 

sheep need shearing. I'm glad that at least a few other humans out there still know how to shear them. the shearer who typically demonstrates at Flag Wool is Mick Hofmann. my guild friends who have fleecy animals hire him every spring to come shear for them too. 

 

there weren't many nice fleeces for sale at this year's festival. even if there had been though, I remain uninterested in acquiring any raw fleece to process myself. carding 6 batts of Finn two summers back was tedious enough, I promise. 

if the apocalypse arrives and all the industrial fiber mills become defunct and I need to process wool by hand, I'll get over the tedium and hopefully also make friends with someone who can teach me shepherding and shearing too.

beauty, here and there

I spent a week in California (mostly San Diego) earlier this month. we did lots of beautiful and silly and fun things.

twenty years later, Disneyland remains impressively thorough and dedicated to the task of using plastic fakery (and other material/media) to evoke entire worlds of stories. I will confess that walking through the Galaxy's Edge sections was pretty amazing. the novelty of it. the heat and dust and droids and alien-ness, not to mention the actual model of the Millennium Falcon. I'm not even that much of a Star Wars nerd, am I? 

then I came home again. things here are no less beautiful and silly and fun, in their turns.

remember this gollum jade? he is expanded into a family of 5 separate plants now. the main one is doing so well, and hopefully the others will survive one way or another. 

 

 

summer in progress

if only I had known about Audio Flux when the semester began, it would've been great to challenge students to meet the circuit 7 criteria for part of our class. ah well.

my students did some great work anyway. here are a couple of their final projects: 

Social Upkeep 

Everything Breaks (episode 1 and episode 2) 

I hear that circuit 8 of Audio Flux is coming soon, at least, so maybe I can work it into something for English Composition (our first-year writing class) this fall. in my one 10.35am section I want to focus on listening and understanding and responding thoughtfully. I am not yet sure how, exactly, but hopefully the students will be open to it and cooperative with each other. part of me is skeptical about building real community within the deeply trenched constraints and stretched-out shallowness of classrooms. Dead Poets Societies are not and never have been real, right? but more of me is gonna try anyway. it is worth trying, no matter how slowly and incompletely each little classroom community seems to develop. 

my very intermittent course prep thoughts are mixed in among many, many other plans and ideas and projects and to-do lists. that is what summer is, usually-- a big mishmash of ambition and dreaming and doing stuff and lounging about.

I finished reading (and lazily annotating) John Durham Peters' The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media some several ages ago now. I keep meaning to send my marginalia-ed copy to friend Chris sometime. we'll see if I get around to it.

this week, I'm getting around to posting all the neat quotes and concepts from all the dogeared pages. they are a little grandiose and navel-gazey at times, but maybe that is okay given that all our navels are made out of the same dusty star crumbs anyway. 

as I compile and remix these quotes a little bit here, I'm thinking a lot about place. it's been 6 full years and a bit since we moved to Arizona. a new record for longest-time-in-one-area. and while I never really wanted to settle down much there is something nice about being known and being somewhat settled. 

still, we'll see how much longer we last in this scrubby desert land. I can only be in one place at once, physically. and there are so many places! media can bridge them somewhat (and times also, a little). but old postcards from California aren't the same as actual California. 

"We make meanings, but do not so in media of our own making; our bodies are embedded in climate history, fire regimes, the spin of the earth, north and south, and relations with plants, artifacts, and organisms of all kinds, especially each other. Whatever nonverbal communication might be, it is certainly richer than our bodies' hints and gestures, rich though they are" (p. 380)

"Real meaning is not fragile: it is exuberantly abundant, overwhelmingly so" (p. 379)

"Nature has meaning, but not for us" (p. 379)

"But the human condition is recursive; it is a conditional condition: our actions change the conditions they act in, especially since they change us; we speak and act, and as we do we change the conditions in which we speak and act" (p. 51) 

"Communication is deeper and older than language" (p. 133) 

(that bit reminded me of this little post by Ian Leslie, which I usually ask all of my students to read in any writing or communication class I'm teaching. the communicative force field around us all has an elemental nature, I suppose.) 

"The stars were both divine and cozy" (p. 386) 

"This is what the universe has yielded: another being in your same form, improbable and precious, with whom you may be able to contribute to the ongoing history of life. Love and beauty are the meaning of the universe, and such meaning is not a human fiat imposed on raw and unfeeling matter by the effort of our will, but rather the product of cosmic history" (p. 385) 

"Perhaps the past cannot be tapped in its full immediacy because the present is not fully immediate. There are vast patches of unobserved magnification, for different organs of sense, for minds quicker or slower than ours. Even for the most acute observer, descriptions might be incomplete, not only because of limited tools but because reality is lacking. Just as we often do not know what we mean when we speak, so the universe might not always be so sure of itself. The cosmos is structurally incomplete, as gap-ridden as its files. Such wonderful conditions these are! The universe generously accommodates our every new act, word, or thought. There is still plenty to do. It is open for new events; it is a container with a gracious void. A growing universe is a (retroactively) incomplete one." (p. 354)

"A phonograph record, tape, or compact disc does not really hold sound: sound exists only as pressure in time and space. Acoustic storage media hold recipes that, with the right equipment, can produce more or less the same sounds over and over, but they don't hold sounds the way a cave wall or canvas can hold an image. Everything that happens in time has to be started over and over in real time. The sound does not last, the word flies away, the vibration dissipates. The vinyl record can endure, but the music it plays on a stereo does not." (p. 311)

"All complex societies have media inasmuch as they use materials to manage time, space, and power. Kittler's point, that culture was always already a procedure of data processing, follows confidently in Innis's path. Kittler's word was Kultur, a term that can mean both "culture" and "civilization"-- and, never shy about grand claims, he certainly meant to include both." (p. 20) 

"For [Norbert Elias], the civilizing process involved three fronts in need of taming: pressures inside people, pressures between people, and pressures between people and nonpeople" (p.159)

"There is an old clash between the ethic of detachment, which calms the soul so well, and the ethic of commitment, which calls us to upsetting action." (p. 384) 

"Death can feel completely normal, dull, and expected, as blank as boredom, and also unbearably bitter and impossible, as hard as thoughts of falling. Death is a great revealer of infrastructures, and, like them, it partakes of the habit of coming out of hiding traumatically." (p. 383) 

"... but this blessed earth will live on, and the clouds and sun will continue to radiate for a season, and the beauty that pulses in our senses will continue to pulse to other senses or just to itself, and that will be enough. Knowing that this beauty will persist gives some comfort. When we go, natality might well bring something new forth. There might be long periods of anoxic oceans and arid wastelands, but something will happen and eventually wildflowers might sprout in the ash we left behind." (p. 387)

 

I will blog more this summer. so much has happened already and classes haven't even been over for a full month yet.

favorite conference

last week, my time was taken up by another academic conference.

I presented on semi-academic podcasts and how awesomely they seem to cultivate discussions about scholarly things for the consumption (and perhaps participation) of non-scholarly audiences. such a thing seems pretty rare, but maybe it's less rare than I'm making it out to be. after all, 

“Podcasting’s bridging of knowledge barriers in an intimate manner is one of its key, and most readily apparent, properties. Thanks to the medium’s wide accessibility— given its general affordability and portability— knowledge in diverse domains can be shared by individuals and groups around the world. Thanks, as well, to their intimate, personal and often-conversational natures, podcast episodes can help individuals of different educational levels cross disciplinary boundaries easily. Audience members need not be enrolled in an educational system in order reap their benefits” (Swiatek, 2018, p. 177-178).​

how's that for a minimalist literature review, eh? Swiatek's chapter is in the collection I used as a textbook for my introductory podcast course last year. good stuff.

bridging knowledge barriers can happen across all kinds of lines, not just those of formal higher education, of course. academia is only one of many domains of learning. 

but for my presentation, I concocted a fairly narrow set of criteria for the four examples I showcased. to fit in properly with what I wanted to talk about, the podcast needed to be...

- officially made by/with credentialed, institutionally-affiliated academics ​
- making use of the ethos and/or expertise of their degrees at least a little
- purposefully talking to and/or translating for non-academic audiences ​to some extent

I also limited my examples to humanities/communication-y topics, because that's my discipline, and a 15-minute conference talk cannot be much more comprehensive than that anyway. I am curious to look at other podcasts in this vein though. eventually. Huberman Labs would count. and probably plenty of others I haven't heard of yet.

my observation, as a fairly high level podcast fangirl, has been that most scholarly podcasts don't bother talking beyond their own discipline, much less beyond the academy in general. in a sense, that might be what "scholarly" means-- by, for, and of scholars. but I also knew of a few counter-examples. a few podcasts that managed to feel more openly, accessibly, publicly academic.

for this little starting-place of a conference talk, I looked at these four: Material Girls; Lingthusiasm; Think Fast, Talk Smart; and Professors Play. 

according to my proposal for the event, I wanted "to highlight these as particularly valuable examples of public scholars demonstrating from the ivory tower how playfulness, connection, and personality are key ingredients for learning, teaching, and thriving as 21st-century humans."

want to see my little digital handout with transcribed bits from each show? there's a link to my slides from there too, which in turn have a few painstakingly chosen, hopefully entertaining-ish, audio clips. 

it is perhaps silly to turn my little presentation from last week into a blog post here, but (now that I'm halfway through doing it anyway) it does seem to match the spirit of my whole point— academia doesn't need to keep all of its cool conversations to itself.

on top of making that point, my other goal with the talk was to have fun introducing whoever showed up at my 11:00am panel to a few very engaging podcasts. I called it "Public Scholarship as Playful Pedagogy," but the title easily could've been shuffled into “Playful Scholarship as Public Pedagogy”— I'm still not sure which sounds better. the lines between all these things are fairly slippery at the best of times.

the lofty version of my whole argument is something like this: podcasts are conversations, usually quite public ones that can shape the cultures and communities of the world we live in. sometimes they even create new communities, which in turn have their own world-shaping power. so it matters who gets to be part of the conversation. it matters how the conversations are designed. 

Computers & Writing is one of the best conferences. next year it'll be in Athens, Georgia. will I get to be there and keep talking about podcasts as scholarship or pedagogy or public pedagogical artifacts or anything like that? we shall see.

Kingsolver and current events

almost six months ago, my attention was drawn to all the conflict in Palestine more than it ever had been before. a house down the road from us began flying an Israeli flag all of a sudden. half of all the social media posts are still imploring everyone to speak up, to choose a side or else by default choose complicit cowardice. the news of October 7 and all the terrible news since has been rightly hard to ignore.

since December, my old land acknowledgements post from the summer of 2020 has been oddly popular. the basic stats in blogger tell me it's gotten more than 100 views within the last 30 days. by comparison, a typical post here in this random collection of internet musings gets fewer than 20 views and that's it. but this old post has consistently seen around 30 hits per week for several weeks now-- I'm still not sure why. is it because phrases like "colonial ruin" "violent displacement" and "racist horribleness" are highly topical these past months? I've let my proper Google analytics account languish without updates for too long, so I don't really have a way to find out.

also about six months ago, I was reading Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. a lush and lovely novel--a braid of stories all about our relationships with land, trees, animals, nature, and each other. biology. ecosystems. extinction or conservation, and all our efforts inbetween.

there is plenty I've so far remembered about this novel, but the thing I've most wanted to blog about here is a pair of sentences in the middle of it. they are sentences about Jewishness and prejudice and history.

Lusa, one of the three point-of-view protagonist characters in this story, is half Polish, half Arab. she marries blissfully into a struggling-but-resourceful family of appalachian tabacco farmers, too soon loses her husband, inherits his parents' old farm house, and faces various tensions and pressures from her local, white, rural in-laws as a result. 

I keep thinking about this line of dialogue from one of Lusa's chapters. she's talking earnestly with the one in-law, a nephew, she feels closest to. 

"That's what I was thinking, too. Families lose their land for a million reasons. My dad's parents had this wonderful farm in Poland, which they lost for being Jewish. And my mother's people got run off their land for not being Jewish. Go figure."

this pair of contradictions struck me, as I read it for the first time in fall of 2023, so much more definitively and potently than it might have at any other time.

and when did Kingsolver write this? my idle curiosity is easily answered: Prodigal Summer was published almost a quarter-century ago. in October, 2000. 

from devouring her other early novels (Pigs in Heaven, Flight Behavior, Unsheltered), I know Kingsolver has a deft way (sometimes subtle, sometimes less so) of commenting on potentially controversial political realities-- like this seemingly endless conflict in the middle east, or like the relative failings of public education, or like the impact of settler colonialism on indigeneous families, or like the nonsensical state of US healthcare systems. 

in October of 2000, I was an almost-17-year-old. what on earth did the words "Israel" or "Palestine" mean to me then? the first I only knew from a bunch of biblical prophecies and hymns, the second from Laurie R. King's A Letter of Mary (1997) and O, Jerusalem (1999), if indeed I'd really heard of Palestine at all. in neither context did I think very critically about what these stories meant. honestly, I was probably quite detached from both versions of the place. their respective peoples. they all may as well have been equally, ineffably, untouchably fictional.

halfway between then and now, I must have seen this rather haunting animation make the rounds on the internet. you've probably seen it, too.

unsurprisingly, there are dozens of new comments on that page since the events of last October.

looking into the piece again this past week, I realized that a full-length film version was produced and likewise donated to the public domain in 2018. do I have the time and spiritual energy to watch it? hopefully someday. (I've also now realized that the artist, as generous as she has been with her artwork, seems to have some not so cool opinions about the social construct of gender, so there is that to grapple with too.) 

{ the Palestinian flag, as if made of butterflies, borrowed from this kind soul on deviantart }
 

being Jewish. 

not being Jewish. 

we might say Lusa's ficitonal comments here are oversimplifying things.

and yes, I'm usually the first to say (to myself if nowhere else) there must be more to it there's so much we don't know how can anyone have a truly worthwhile opinion what's the use in trying to fully understand it anyway it's so complicated and what can I do about it or about anything, little me with my little blog and my little comfortable life?

what's truly oversimplified is any inkling of a thought that this single roundabout post regarding my country's rather terrible, rather unconscionable involvement in the horrors of this geopolitical situation is anything like enough to counter my general day-to-day silence on the topic. 

no matter how many times I might ponder bringing it up to my students or asking all the ROTC cadets how they feel about Aaron Bushnell or posting something to instagram with a hashtag like #CeasefireNow or #GazaWillBeFree... thinking about a few lines from an old Barbara Kingsolver novel and mentally wringing my hands about all the knotted historical roots of this conflict aren't enough at all. 

I don't know what could be enough. write to congress? to the president? just once? or every month? every weekend? with a few pleading letters or phone calls to these more-powerful-than-me people, can I then say I've done my part? 

I don't know. it doesn't seem like it. no number of letters or public protests, and certainly no ocean of hashtags, no matter how many, seems like enough.

so for now, current events continue to sweep across the world, sort of but not really dragging me with them. even so, we are all connected. we are all somehow jointly creating this world. the fact that I'll never be able to single-handedly fix anything on the other side of the planet doesn't mean I can safely give up, right? even if I don't-- or can't-- truly know if my impact on the sprawling web of the universe is leading to more preservation and less extinction of light and goodness, I have to keep trying. 

is it up to me to decide which side of the scale my feet are on? to judge my own quotas of light vs. dark?

for now, it is. I'm the only one who can. am I doing my best?  

and spring semester 2024

eleven years ago, back at the very beginning of my academic career, I trekked 6 hours west from Lubbock, Texas, in my very old leper of a car (the paint was all but totally peeled way from its poor hood), to attend my first ever academic conference in Albuquerque.

this week I'm gonna trek 6 hours east and attend the same conference, this time in a rental car, with way more academic experience, an institutional credit card for travel-related purchases, and a significantly different research agenda. I'll be presenting this Saturday all about how I designed and get to teach a fun little class on podcasts. 

 {the title slide, so far anway}

 

and I'll get to see some of my old professors from USU. very excited for that bit. 

it'll be fun, hopefully. I hope I'll meet some other cool new interesting fellow scholars along the way, too. we shall see, given how sunny and warm it looks to be in Albuquerque this weekend, how much of the conference I actually sit through.

in the more normal weeks of this semester, I'm teaching a couple sections of technical writing. the same old basic tech writing course, only slightly different every time by virtue of new students and a new me and a new world.

besides teaching, I'm also working on a book chapter about podcast transcripts and leading various faculty from various other programs through a series of mushy but important assessment adventures. friend Caroline and I are still working on soliciting content for a new issue of the campus literary arts magazine (the second since we took charge of it last year). maybe we'll have an official reading event at the library with the creative writing class-- fingers crossed. 

it's all nearly haflway over, this set of 16 work weeks called spring semester. at the moment the halfway point feels encouraging. time ticks onward. work gets accomplished. knowledge is made and shared and reinforced. skills are modeled, practiced, learned, forgotten, re-learned.

in other news, I'm also finally getting to see some work from the past year come out in official publication! perhaps the coolest online academic journal of all, Kairos, made space for my multimedia oral history-ish interview piece all about two colleagues who recently retired.

and then colleagues and I have a co-authored piece in the most recent issue of Programmatic Perspectives (the differently cool but still very awesome journal from the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication). some awesome Purdue colleagues have an article in the same issue, which is quite cool to see. 

time ticks onward. I've been here 4 years. 2 more until hopefully they give me tenure. 

in the meantime, age and experience accumulate. some days I feel older and other days not at all. 

next January, in the auspicious year of 2025, it'll be 20 years since I started this blog for a class. how will we celebrate that, I wonder?

fantasy sprawl

quarterfinals match 4:
The One Ring vs A Song of Ice and Fire

as much as the authors behind these two worlds may match each other for ambition, scope, and nuanced historical detail, the two worlds themselves feel vastly different. both may be vast, rich, strikingly realistic fantasy lands, with some very cool linguistical inventiveness threaded through, but Tolkien and Martin do not tell the same kinds of stories with anything like the same kind of tone, do they? 

I did find the two RPG versions of these literary works equally immersive games, at least. in terms of their layered, evocative gameplay and vibes, the two are very well matched.

in response to my opening round review of The One Ring, friend Chris commented that in no other match thus far had my preference been quite so blatantly obvious from so early on. at the time, I didn't realize how thoroughly, one-sidedly gushing I'd become, even if I did acknowledge that The One Ring had swept me off my feet.  

likewise, the opening round performance of A Song of Ice and Fire may have been just as imbalanced. it certainly didn't have to do very much to beat out Shadowrun (though my one-sided-ness that time ran in the opposite direction).

and now, how does the adventurous-but-still-somehow-cozy epic of Middle-Earth fare against the cut-throat political dances of Westeros? 

I can't say it's quite as simple as it might seem. both games were delightful to play, uniquely engaging, and satisfyingly substantive. the story moments of both felt meaningful, plot lines perfectly in tension among our characters' colorful backstories, current circumstances, and murky reached-for futures.

thankfully, in real life, we don't have to choose between Tolkien and Martin; we can be fans of both stories and make time to play both games. but this is an arbitrary tournament set-up where only one of these sixteen RPG systems can win the prize.

SYSTEM	The One Ring	A Song of Ice and Fire
back cover tagline =	"Enter the world of Middle-earth..."	"Adventure, war, and intrigue in George R.R. Martin's World of Westeros"
publisher =	Free League Publishing	Green Ronin Publishing
pub. date =	2020	2014
original cost =	$49.85	$49.95
length =	10 chapters / 240 pages	13 chapters / 320 pages
my exp. level =	none prior	none prior

---

and so the cozy version of adventure is going to win. me being me (aspirationally part hobbit, after all), how could I not choose the gameworld where extra meals, singing, and warm baths can be part of your character advancement? 

the only thing I found to mope about with The One Ring is that its character creation options feel so relatively minimal. I mused aloud to Jeremiah the other day that if we could mix just a few more of the classic Dungeons & Dragons classes and races and stats into the simplicity of The One Ring, that might be a perfect combination for me. but upon further thought, I don't think it would actually work that well. it would muddy the beauty and integrity of the game's design just a bit too much. 

likely the only reason I imagine myself wanting such a combination is because I feel so familiar with D&D character creation processes. my brain is latching onto it for comfort more than out of any true preference. and that means the real answer here is to do more character creation using The One Ring, to get familiar with it, and to trust that I'll fall further in love.

 

semifinals match-ups (coming soon...): 
The One Ring vs Vampire: the Masquerade
Star Wars vs Dungeons & Dragons

long ago and far, far away

quarterfinals match 2:
7th Sea 2e vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny

if these two were movies or television shows, I would for sure pick 7th Sea. why? because oceans, rapier duels, and period costumes are just miles more to my taste than blasters, laser swords, and hyperspace. 

but these are not movies. they’re games: two fascinating RPGs that have beaten out their prior competitors by relatively slim margins. allow me to once again honorably mention Changeling and Cyberpunk RED as I marvel at the chances that have paired two strikingly different alternate/imaginary/far-far-away histories up against each other here. 

when I wrote about these two in the opening round, I noted that both have a pretty straightforward aesthetic of heroism and villainy, light side and dark side, goodness triumphing through even the thickest tangles of temptation. those aren't the only kinds of stories you'd be limited to telling in each system, but the game design lends itself to happy endings, mostly. both worlds ask for brave and impetuous, good-at-heart characters. both types of stories might be highly action oriented, or highly political, or most likely some of both. 

it's easier than anything to see a poetic resonance between the vibe of sailing ships into pirate-infested waters and that of piloting spacecraft through dangerous asteroid fields. and we absolutely must admit that the dashing, caped Lando Calrissian would fit gorgeously in either setting-- just swap those blasters for a pair of revolvers and we'd be set. 

since my earlier review of Star Wars: Force and Destiny we've acquired a brand new copy of Star Wars: Age of Rebellion and are waiting on Edge of the Empire to show up in the mail. then we'll have the whole trilogy of game books, ready for our in-person gaming group to use in the new year for a new collaborative story. so that’s something awesome to look forward to. I think I'll create and play as a human rebel this time... a refugee of Alderaan running headfirst into the difficult question of how far we should go in the fight against the empire...

in plain old down-to-earth reality, Star Wars is actually also a movie (okay, many movies, and shows, and, and, yes, yes, etc.)— but that and its relatively unique and pervasive cultural footprints are not why it's more likely to win this match. I wouldn't call myself a Star Wars fangirl by any means, though I do enjoy plenty of Star Wars media and find much of it quite touching in its way. recently, one of my new favorite podcasts released a really interesting in-depth materialist critique of the whole Star Wars franchise and (to a lesser extent) its fandoms. it's a great episode-- check it out if you have an hour to spare, or at least skim the transcript if you are at all curious and tolerant of such scholarly exuberance. the "behind the episode" bonus content is pretty neat too. there is a Star-Wars-y chart for us at the bottom, even. 

(materialist cultural critique is the coolest. and okay fine, I'll admit to being a hopeless Hannah McGregor fangirl if nothing else.)

SYSTEM	7th Sea 2e	Star Wars: Force and Destiny
back cover tagline =	"The roleplaying game of swashbuckling and intrigue."	"A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."
publisher =	John Wick Presents / Chaosium Inc.	Fantasy Flight Games
pub. date =	2016	2015
original cost =	$59.99	$59.95
length =	9 chapters / 304 pages	13 chapters / 444 pages
my exp. level =	some	a bit more than some

---

Star Wars as an RPG has been a formative sort of game for me— it was one of the first really long and epic stories I got to be a part of with other really dedicated engaged roleplayers (big shoutouts here go to Kay and Shaun and Rhett; y'all were great players for Vampire and Star Wars and bits and pieces of other stuff too). playing as Yahla, being part of her whole story arc and seeing how she faced a dozen dark challenges that I can barely imagine facing in real life, was so cool. it was a chance to play and experience and really lean into what roleplaying games are all about. so it has to win.

7th Sea does deserve plenty of honorable mentions, so let that be known (shout outs to friend Chris and Alyssa for their parts in that campaign, too). Zetallia could've perhaps been something like what Yahla was, if she'd had more time to unfold. hmm... maybe an epilogue to this tournament could be a showdown among all the most formative player characters I've been a part of. that could be interesting.

but for now, may The Force be with us all. the penultimate quarterfinal match is going to be really, really difficult.

next match-up review: World of Darkness vs Vampire: the Masquerade 5e

palimpsest

seasons of 90 days each. seems like plenty of time. one quarter of a full circle, fair time for each mood of the year.
what was I wanting to blog about?

paper and trees. loud noises and how to hear through them.  

-

I've been thinking a lot about my grandma. grandma Ashdown. she comes into my dreams

my coat pockets for the past two winters have held traces of that March funeral three years ago: a whole pecan my dad had given me. bottle of lotion from the hotel. baggage claim slips. 

-

this week the seasons tangibly tilted, almost all at once, one into the other. winter-spring chills are banished by the baking warmth of full-on spring. snow and freezing feel like the smallest of old memories from here.

there are new plants! phlox and day lilies and an easter cactus.

the last day of classes, yesterday. the whole semester at its boiling point, with only grading and emails left before it all simmers away.

for summer break? so many art plans.
and exercise plans.
reading and rereading,
writing and rewriting.
paints and puzzles and games. plenty of sunshine too.

I'd been thinking about all the roles from whatever Goffman theory of something or other... but I'd forgotten the words for it.

my other grandma was a teacher. she taught much younger humans than I get to teach, and I don't know how she had the patience. but if it weren't for her and others like her who somehow do, all the building blocks of reading and writing wouldn't be there for my students to use for anything more advanced.  

-

six years ago, riverside vows in the rain.

now? I must finish all this grading and work. then we'll go lay about in the sunshine. fix my bike. go camping at least 3 times. family reunion adventures in July. rent kayaks every week if we feel like it. 

-

I found this letter in the back of an old mostly-empty journal. it's a letter I never sent, for some reason. there isn't year with the date of Jan 22 in the corner-- but all evidence (the stationery, my careful handwriting and lack of capitalization, the turn of phrase and the doodles at the bottom) points to 2001 or thereabouts.

it is written to yet a different grandma-- step-grandma, if we need to be that specific. it conjures different memories. twenty-two years ago? when I was barely almost kindof a grown-up?

"grandma chesley:
greetings! all the family says hi and wishes you well. i decided that i would write this whole letter just because. [hearts] life's been crazy as it always is. i wonder when it will all settle down. anyway meanwhile i go on through all these crazy experiences, thinking all sorts of crazy things while in so many different moods. it seems like everything changes, but never the way people expect. i really really hope my life turns out well. most of the time it seems like i have no clue and won't amount to anything special. the things i care about can be so ridiculous and yet so serious... that's just more proof that life is a paradox.

for all the wrong in the world, the truth seems extraordinarily unbelievable at times. it certainly is hard to concentrate on the good and the beautiful when so many trivial matters lie in the way. i think i would give anything for an eternity of peace, and i guess that is really what we are reaching for.
[smiley, heart, flower, star, leaf, raindrop, rainbow]"

dear past self, it will not settle down. but you'll learn to settle yourself and settle into yourself. eternity may or may not exist in any meaningful way for these limited human brains of ours, but peace does, at least.

poolside

sometimes I bike to the pool at our community center. it's one mile away, down the road and around the corner. 

are all the HOA fees (that I barely remembered to pay on time for this quarter) worth it for this lovely nearby pool?

hm... maybe. 

the sunshine is worth everything. and swimming a bit is a nice reward of sorts for a two-mile bike ride. 

usually I bring a book. today it was podcasts instead. 

 

solstice

the Bradshaw mountains to the south. 

summer, unfinished.

east carolina and back

last month I got to attend the 2022 Computers & Writing conference, hosted on the charming East Carolina University campus. this year, it was a hybrid virtual/in-person event, which means that on top of the eight in-person sessions I inhaled one after the other while I was there, I also still have at least 12 tabs open from the online program, just waiting for me to spend proper time with some of the virtual presentations. one of them is this one about academic twitter and such, which features none other than friend Patti!

friend Patti is, as I write, gallivanting gloriously around in Portugal or somewhere similarly awesome thereabouts. from her instagram missives, it all looks terribly fun.

traveling for this conference was fun, but stressful. I used to love airports and the shock of new places. maybe I'm getting old and tired, or maybe the pandemic times have just cast shadows over it all. or maybe some of both. all the airports-- Phoenix, Charlotte, Raleigh/Durham, Detroit-- they were all crowded, hectic arenas. were they just as crowded, before? I can't remember.

here are some photos of the little creek I walked by on my way to-and-from the conference events that week.

and one of the lovely pathway itself, through the tall green trees.

while I was in North Carolina for conference reasons, I took some time to explore downtown Raleigh before I had to come home. it was pretty cool. 

I don't know what this tall reflectively blue building is, but it surprised me as I wandered. I felt ambushed by it in somewhat the same way I did by the Eiffel tower. only this was bright daylight. 

through the gaps between trees and buildings there, you can see the white tents of an arts festival. I had just enough time that afternoon to browse four or five booths, let the live music wash disjointedly over my ears, and wish for more time to souvenir-shop.

I did manage to acquire a nice belt from these recyclers-of-bicycle-tubes, for Jeremiah, before hurrying to return a rental car and resubmit to the circus of the airport. little did I know just how much of a merry-go-round the Raleigh/Durham airport would become for me that fateful Sunday. 

but that's a whole other story, and perhaps too complainingly for here, anyway.

riding

last week, real horses:

this week, fantasy machine horses in Horizon: Forbidden West.

{ not my photo, but we can pretend }

warm weather and vulnerabilities

I love being barefoot.

I love the feeling of clean carpet or tile or concrete under my feet. love walking on cool grass or warm sand or slick mud.

thankfully Arizona gives us plenty of good being-barefoot weather, overall. I avoid socks at all costs unless I'm jogging or hiking in actual shoes.

being-barefoot weather is upon us for good now. spring! summer break mere 3 weeks hence!

it's exhilarating and intimidating, the idea of summer. I won't be teaching. what will I do? how will I choose between all the crafts and writing and projects and excursions and naps I want to fit in? 

maybe I can figure out a way to do it all. (there was a pretty cool podcast episode from Maisie Hill about that, just last month.)

we shall see.

first I need to survive the semester and all its grading, meetings, lesson plans, presentations, and commencement shenanigans. 

I will. we all will. all 97 of my students and I and my colleagues too. 

somehow.

April is national poetry month, isn't it? 

I'm not a poet-- not really. but sometimes my brain thinks very poetically.

I like to read poetry. 

even more I like to hear poetry read aloud. seeing it on a page isn't quite good enough usually.

this poem, "The Hill We Climb," from a whole fifteen months ago, is a good and grand tear-jerking hopeful poem to listen to. 

to read it silently-- well, it might still be good. or it might seem long and uneven, or as the post I linked to just there has it, too dense.

what are the best parts? it is hard to choose. and pasting them here won't do any justice to how they sound in Amanda Gorman's own voice.

listen and watch the whole thing first:

and now, here are the most moving sections for me-- these three from near the beginning, middle, and end:

We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what “just” is isn’t always justice.
And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it.
Somehow we weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

and

So, while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe, now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us? 

and the last few lines, singed with cliche just at the edges--

When day comes, we step out of the shade of flame and unafraid. The new dawn balloons as we free it.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

maybe I ought to go looking for more of Ms. Gorman's poetry.

 

for the record, I've been reading various other non-poetry lately, including:

The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey  (not the winner of this year's Tournament of Books)

Poet Warrior, by Joy Harjo (recommended via yoga church friends)

Trigger Warning, short stories by Neil Gaiman

The Marvelous Clouds, by John Durham Peters

and 

A Primer for Forgetting, by Lewis Hyde (the same one who wrote Common as Air, which I managed to cite in my dissertation) 

 

here's to springtime and reading and being barefoot as much as possible. 

almost winter break

the stars in the winter seem brighter, or shinier, or at least more, possibly because there is more night for them to shine in.

yesterday, it rained and rained and rained all afternoon and evening. it began around noon as the barest mist of precipitation in the grey, chill air. at some point while I was teaching my last three technical writing classes of the semester, it intensified until all the sidewalks were slicked and slippery. 

today was the first fully cold-cold day of the season. 

a dusting of snow on top of Granite Mountain made it look a little like a delightfully craggy, if lopsided, bundt cake. 

(did you know that "bundt" is technically a trademarked brand name? I was somewhat astonished to learn this when I doublechecked my spelling just now. I guess it's like kleenex and google and velcro and all the other trademarks that have crept into the zone of regular old vocabulary for what was once the latest amazing innovation but is now just everyday stuff. the company still enforces its trademark over Bundt cake pans-- but you can call the cake itself a bundt cake without issue. thank goodness.) 

way up to the north, the mountains around Flagstaff have much more than a dusting of snow-- they look like they've been repainted altogether in a major revision to the horizon. the distant trio of sharp peaks seem to be layered with at least seven perfectly fine, perfectly white veils of silk. 

when will it snow here in the valley? my guess is not until next month. but it's hard to say. the nights are officially freezing. the skies have been grey all week. the chill wind and the bright sun are battling over the temperature of the air.

now that classes are over, we'll see if I can sleep in past the late sunrises and hibernate a bit more, as nature's signals have been directing us all to do for at least a month. 

what else? my other winter break plans include... 

- visiting my family and homeland to the north
- getting a neat haircut, and maybe some highlights or color or something to go with it
- reading at least ten books for fun
- watching all the longest versions of all the Lord of the Rings films
- baking several pies + some other sort of holiday sweets for the neighbors 

I did want to join a Christmas choir this month, but I'm still a bit too worried about a certain viral pandemic situation. and singing in a facemask doesn't seem like it would be feasible or effective. hopefully next year...?

in less fun (but still pretty fun) arenas, I also have research to work on (more podcast transcript tracking, among other things) and LibriVox projects to edit and finish (just 4 more sections of this to get done). and that is plenty. in fact, I should take some of my expectations about all that down a few notches. two pies will probably be plenty. 

we'll see how industrious I actually want to be during the nineteen or so days of de facto freedom I have before spring semester drags me back to the office. if I can plan all my Business Communication syllabi next week, I won't have to think about that at all until probably... January 10 or so. 

 

{ these two images are very old scans of very old Christmas card sketches }

late autumn in the desert

I am in between roadtrips at the moment. tomorrow we set off east, north, to the cold windy scapes of Chicagoland. I hope the trip is smooth and not too exhausting. the holiday time with in-laws will, I'm sure, be festive and cheery and very much worth the two-day drive.

last weekend, taking advantage of our Veteran's Day day off, I took a short, sweet roadtrip up to St. George. I stayed with friend Chalice for a few nights, ate some great food (including cheesecake crepes and almost-too-spicy basil chicken ramen), and joined my sister to hike or rock climb or something. I wouldn't find out exactly which until I got up there.

first, we spent the morning leisurely hiking around Confluence Park, enjoying the morning sunshine glinting all over the the bright blue Virgin River. it was such a gloriously nice day.

next was the more rigorous bit. we set out with ropes and harnesses to rappel down into a slot canyon and canyoneer around boulders and through puddles. it was a beautiful spot-- Red Cliffs National Conservation Area. I had never been there, never done anything like rappelling, but so it goes when one signs up to tag along for unspecified outdoorsing. 

as it turns out, it was awesome.

{ photo taken and shared by one of our canyoneering companions who brought their phones along }

 

hopefully I get to do some more of it again someday. beautiful rocks and autumn foliage. strenuous exercise. gravity. adrenaline. scraped and muddy shins.

 

much of this adventure reminded me of my final spring break as an undergraduate, years and years ago. the Red Cliffs isn't far at all from Zion National Park. the steep climb out of Yankee Doodle Canyon reminded me just a little bit of the last few yards up to the top of Angels Landing, sans the helpful chains.

the whole canyon loop we followed is less than a mile long, but keeping our socks dry from puddles and taking time for so many photographs slowed us down considerably. the sky was darkening by the time we even found the way up and back to the road. the moon, a nearly perfect half-moon, peeked down at us and pulled thicker and thicker layers of darkness out over the whole sky. it got cold in a heartbeat. 

 

the next morning, I drove home again, on mostly empty highways, first under star-strewn pre-dawn black and then alongside a peachy pale sunrise that just so softly outlined the shine of Lake Mead as I raced across Nevada. Arizona welcomed me back again with more traffic and more sunshine, more desert, more cactuses. 

 

tonight, the moon is a soft fuzzy circle of shine, like a gauzy flower all aglow. tomorrow, perhaps she will see us off at our early departure toward the north-east.

places and possibilities

thinking about going places. far away places.

nearby places have their charm... but running errands is mostly tiring; walking the dog is lovely but routine.

summer and travel go together most years. or they have in the past, anyway. lately it seems like so long since I've gone anywhere new just to see what's there and what it looks like.

as i reread some of my old journals, it seems astonishing how much I traveled even just five or six years ago. so much back and forth home for holidays, random cities for conferences or helping friends move, and a few weeks-long adventures for studying abroad. it seems like half my journal entries back then were prefaced with "notes from [insert name of airport here]." 

 

there are many reasons for the relative lack of travel these days, of course. there's a pandemic still wandering around mutating and spreading. small, short, careful trips seem best. we also just bought a house, so it's everyone's turn to come visit us now, to see what's here.

here is pretty beautiful, I must say. we have an ancient volcano overlooking some very fine walking and biking trails. we have (unlike last year, during which this rainstorm was practically the only one) an almost-nightly pattern of refreshing monsoons feeding into a bunch of glorious greenery. we have cool mornings and a very serviceable set of patio furniture. and a fire pit too, for roasting things and for cozy evening ambiance.

last week Jeremiah's aunt and uncle stopped by for a night on their way from west to east. they brought a handsome dog named Herschel with them and we had a grand time showing them around, catching up on each others' lives, and playing a bit of mahjong.

who else wants to come visit? we can teach you mahjong if you like. or we can hike up to the top of Glassford Hill and have a picnic.

what else? 

I've been teaching this summer. small sections of Technical Report Writing over two six-week terms. it's been mostly fun. but I'll be glad for a few weeks' break between summer and fall classes starting up. maybe we'll go camping. maybe we'll squeeze in one more tiny, careful roadtrip. or throw one or two more dinner parties. or just sleep in more and read all the books. 

my other activities for summer have included daily morning walks with our restless little Hamilton pug, pulling weeds out of our rock-covered yard, potting and re-potting succulents (new and old), tending to a dying basil plant and a thriving tomato plant (many thanks to my dad), taking a few bike rides, committing to bits of yoga, baking too much for two people, and reading outside as often as I can get away with.

oh, and I'm running a little game of Dungeons and Dragons-- a pre-written adventure entitled Curse of Strahd. there haven't been any dragons in it yet, but there might be. it's proving quite interesting and entertaining. ostensibly, I am using this set of published ideas to create a backdrop of tension and danger mixed in with meaningful story and fun rewards for the players who roleplay in the foreground of it all. from the first few sessions though, I've felt like my role is equal parts creator and observer. the player characters are out there on a stage that I threw together, putting on fascinating and rich performances for us all. I hope I get better at it so I can keep doing it and find out what happens next.

in other news, I want to soon blog properly about Braiding Sweetgrass and all its lovely messages about paying attention to nature. I should also finish reading and taking some more organized notes on a few books about collaborative writing pedagogy. there is a conference talk to prepare in the next two months, and always more scholarly books to read. one on my mind this afternoon is Against the Romance of Community, the pdf of which is sitting around in at least three digital folders somewhere, waiting with its few scattered annotations for me to get back into it. 

I know it's kind of cheesy to use books as a stand-in for travel, but ah well. if Scotland and Paris and Germany and London and Beijing are out of reach for the next long while, at least I can read and re-read about everywhere else. everyone else. all their connections and intricate influences on one another.

 

and because I needed an excuse to type it all out for myself here, I'm going to include these paragraphs from near the end of Kimmerer's book about indigenous wisdom. this chapter is called "People of Corn, People of Light," all about the marks we are leaving on the earth through our ways of being, our ways of knowing, and our stories.

"Many Indigenous peoples share the understanding that we are each endowed with a particular gift, a unique ability. Birds to sing and stars to glitter, for instance. It is understood that these gifts have a dual nature, though: a gift is also a responsibility. If the bird's gift is song, then it has a responsibility to greet the day with music. It is the duty of birds to sing and the rest of us receive the song as a gift. ....
"Other beings are known to be especially gifted, with attributes that humans lack. Other beings can fly, see at night, rip open trees with their claws, make maple syrup. What can humans do?
"We may not have wings or leaves, but we humans do have words. Language is our gift and our responsibility. I've come to think of writing as an act of reciprocity with the living land. Words to remember old stories, words to tell new ones, stories that bring science and spirit back together to nurture our becoming people made of corn." (p. 347) 

I promise I'll blog more about this lovely book one day soon, blog-all-dogeared-pages style. and if you've read it too, let's have an impromptu book club about it so I can hear all your thoughts. wouldn't that be fun?