Maru's Mun Journal

I hate Windows Vista! Here at the Indian Internet Café, the lame computers are running Vista now, and they are so slowwwwww it hurts. This one needs a minute to think about wheter to load a new screen, or reload a screen...

But I am glad this exists, anyway. Otherwise, I would have to bother Falk the Metropolitan more than I want to, or go very far just to get online for a little.

The upside of the Dead Goldfish Time is that I get to really pay lots and lots of attention to my cats. They like sitting on me undisturbed by typing, or playing with me for a long stretch of time at once.

( Oh, and a meme... )

Comment with 'Icons!' and I'll pick five of your icons to explain.

Mine, from athousanderrors :

Nebra Sky Disc	Rotten Reality	Blacherniotissa	Needless Writing	Purple Pride

Nebra Sky Disc:
The Nebra Sky Disc is a bronze age Celtic astrolabe/portable henge kind of thing found near Nebra in former East Germany, and considered an archaeological sensation. I saw an exhibition of it in Mannheim a few years ago. I use the icon for serious historical or spiritual posts or comments.

Reality is a rotten place to be:
That's from a fearfully hippie-esque movie from the the Sixties called 'Psych-Out' in which the (then) young Dean Stockwell played this, erm, hippie who was continually stoned and spouted this deep stuff when stoned, which was sort of continually. It was meant to be serious when it was made, but came over rather funny in 2007, when the Nazgul and I watched it. He says that line in just that scene while taking some terribly strong hallucinogenic with the main heroine. We almost keeled over laughing, and I decided it had to be an icon, and it had to say the text in hippie-esque pink writing. I use it for posts and comments about the general SNAFU-ness and ridiculousness of the world as such.

Blacherniotissa:
It's an icon icon I own. Having an icon of an icon is a kind of meta that appealed to me.

Needless Writing:
Anita Blake icon! Bloody LKH interrupts plot for three pages of description of how Jean-Claude has redone his sitting room, in loving detail, while the really urgent and suspenseful plot just wibbles away in the back of the reader's mind, waiting until the waffling excursion is over. Too much sex in a book is bad as it is; interrupting both plot and (omnipresent potential of) sex for pages and pages of white-and-gold interior design is idiotic.

Purple Pride:
That is the actual name of that breed of tulip! And it's one of my first pictures with my digital camera when it was new. I bought the flowers especially so there could be pictures, and from those pictures, an icon. It was all about asar_suti , of course, who at that time had taken over the garden in Milliways. Suti is all but gone, but the purple thing stuck with me.-

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. (Please note: If you simply wish to comment on something I've said but don't want to participate in the meme, that is fine. I will only give you five words if you specifically comment you with 'Words!')

Now, there are some words here that I have done in the first or second iteration of this meme already; but I was curious as to what yet another Milli!mun would give me.

RP: I never played the tabletop version, or computer games (much). I was utterly clueless when I stumbled upon the old Discworld RPG in February 2004. I laughed my head off at the Patrician (as played by BNF copperbadge) going on about V-day, and apped Margolotta the teetotal vampire lady. Then, more charries followed. I probably did everything wrong that anybody can possibly do wrong in RPage. I was never given a manual of the most basic dos and don'ts. Godmoding, terrible sues, random OCs, blurring of IC/OOC divide -- I all did it, more or less. But I learned. The genre of 'journal-based role-playing' was just inventing itself, and we were among the seminal places that later siphoned off their muns into Milliways; another was one called 'Restiturere' from which essayel came. While the Disworld RPG fell silent, Milliways boomed (in its first autumn of existence it had 60 to 90 EPs per day!), and even though I had a DW-RPG pup over there from the first morning of its existence (crossovers from other RPGs were allowed back then, and villainny, one of the two founders of Milliways, had been in the DW-RPG as well), I only let myself be lured over there in November 2004, agreeing to play a villain for somebody else for two or three weeks. That villain was asar_suti, and the rest, as they say, is history. Some of that history is not for public consumption; suffice it to say that I am still there, and so is 'Suti, while other people are long gone and forgotten, and yet other people I used to have problems with have evolved into friendlies, if not outright friends. And I think you do need bad experiences that teach you. I could never deal well with bitches before starting RPage; now, I eat them for breakfast at work and they come back to thank me.

Goth: Yes, please. Big-G Goths, and little-G goths. I'm a bit of both. My family came from an area where the Goths settled for a century or two on their way south from the Baltic sea (if you go with the Jordanes version of their history), and there are people that claim Goths ousted from Italy settled in Bavaria, among other footsore ragtag of the Barbarian Migration (which is a half-joking definition for what the Bavarians really are, as they weren't known as a tribe before they settled here, at all). I balk a bit at the idea that the snarky bastards in the Miserable Village might be desendants of Teja's people, but on the other hand, the Lady Lena and the people in the tiny village where my cats are from? I can totally see it in them. In any case, here was part of Theodoric's realm all right; Felix Dahn makes the point while desribing people at the great assembly at Regeta which elected Witichis by saying they had come from as far as Augusta Vindelicorum, which is Augsburg. Which made me snerk, as Munichers find "Augschpurg" faintly funny...

History: We have that here as a matter of course. And while not everybody is always much aware of it, I have grown up to pay attention to the past, and its important influence on the present. I have grown up with the stories my grandmother told about her childhood, and I have grown up looking for pieces of Samian ware in vineyards along the Rhine, where my father, who is an archaeologist and used to work for the state of Hesse until he retired, suspected that Roman villae rusticae ought to have been. He has this theory that they weren't just private manor houses/large farms, but (up there near the Germanic limes, beyond the Rhine) also look-out posts against a possible invasion from a breached limes, and a network spreading civilisation into the hinterlands of the empire. So, he has studied maps a lot and has theories where (judging from known villa sites) more villae ought to be, to make the lookout posts complete, to be able to see the next villae up and down the lines, and to close the net. So, finding Samian ware on a suspected site was a great achievement! I died with envy at around age ten or eleven when my friend who had come with us for lack of anything better to do found a piece at an important and otherwise virgin site, and I didn't! Also, I have an uncle who is a historian, and have translated articles for him and colleagues of him, which I gave up after one lady made an utter mess of it, kept changing text that I had already translated, and never paid in full. I decided I no longer needed capricious, disorganised professors randomly screwing up my life with their demands, taking large chunks out of it for comparatively little pay.

Reenactment: I don't really re-enact; the Nazgul and I merely visit appropriate events in costumes we try to get historically correct. Kaltenberg we missed this year due to torrential downpours; now we have high hopes for Maxlrain at the end of September, where we would go with the Lady Lena in whose stalble my cats were born. I think I'll make another peplum before that, though. While the dress is all right, I really have all sorts of misgivings about the outer garment...

Germany: I live there. German is my first language, but I started learning English when I was three, from a great-aunt just returned from a year in Washington with her husband, who was a professor of mathematics and taught at Georgetown for a year. He has a Wikipedia entry, but only in German, sorry. It doesn't mention, though,  that he was married twice, and that he met his second wife while they both worked for the German opponents of Bletchley Park. My great-aunt was that fiendishly clever, and later wrote her PhD thesis about Cassiodorus; she was a classicist. It all comes circling back, definitely. Anyway, she taught me English early, and I never ever use the plea of 'not my first language' when interacting with people. Starting at age three gives you no excuse there. Otherwise, it is interesting to live in Germany; there's lots of history here, most of it not actively awful, and situated as it is in the middle of Europe, and one of the founding members of the EU, there is an interesting future, while not really going through 'interesting times' right now.

cob_web has this wonderful list of things people told her she would grow out of when she got older, but didn't.

Many of the things on there, barring the Doc Martens and the interesting glasses, are true for me as well, but I think I'll add my own. This could be a real meme!

• Wanting to be a writer -- I actually earn pocket money writing spinelessly nice book reviews
• Wanting my own pet -- I am still amazed that OMG I have my own cats!
• Geeking out on fictional worlds
• Fangirling fictional blokes
• Posters on the wall
• Not having a 'proper' bed
• Flavoured tea
• Putting the volume on my music waaaaaay up so it follows me all over the flat
• An almost missionary enthusiasm for new things and ideas I freshly discovered
• Eating with chopsticks
• My ancient stinky stuffed dolphin
• Fascination with bloke-on-bloke love or sex, AKA slash (only it wasn't called that back then)

Now, which are yours?

Here are the rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. They don't have to be the greatest books you've ever read, just the ones that stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

1. Winnie The Pooh -- A.A. Milne
2. The Hobbit -- J.R.R. Tolkien
3. A Struggle For Rome -- Felix Dahn
4. The Silmarillion -- J.R.R. Tolkien
5. The Portrait Of Mr. W.H. -- Oscar Wilde
6. The Persian Boy -- Mary Renault
7. The Charioteer -- Mary Renault
8. Foucault's Pendulum -- Umberto Eco
9. The Master And Margarita -- Mikhail Bulgakov
10. Always Coming Home -- Ursula LeGuin
11. Death's Head -- Mel Keegan
12. Wraeththu -- Storm Constantine
13. Memnoch The Devil -- Anne Rice
    
14. The Man in the Moss -- Phil Rickman
15. A Companion To Wolves -- Elizabeth Bear
    

Aside: I did these chronologically; and I took this meme to mean only fiction. I could do another list of the same sort with non-fiction. And yes, there are reasons why Tolkien and Mary Renault occur twice, and why in several author's cases, the one I list is not te main work they are associated with.

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you. (Please note: If you simply wish to comment on something I've said but don't want to participate in the meme, that is fine. I will only give you five words if you specifically comment you with 'Words!')

Goths: I think I explained my past with them the for the last incarnation of this meme, so I'm not going to repeat myself. But I am heading towards a Gothic future! The Nazgul and I will be Gothic women for this year's medieval markets/events, and I am going to construct Gothic garments today and (if needed) tomorrow. The belt and belt pouch, I already have; now for a long shirt and peplum dress. The nazgul is going for the option of skirt and tunic. We have trimming that looks quite authentic (without going to the length of either card-weaving ourselves, or buying expensive card-woven trim), and are going to be quite spectacular. With the added bonus that nobody will ask us whether we're real. As they did when we were nuns.

Tarot: I'd had dabbled in tarot on and off for years (among the people I'd been loosely associated with here in Munich, you simply didn't get not to), and then, Master Urban did an 'eletronic tarot' on CD-ROM, back in 1998 or so. I tested the program for him, and one card that popped up on my radar quite a lot was the Tower. Lots of things were changing in the world just then, approaching the millennium, and in my family. That was about the time when Sphinx got pregnant with the Little Lady, my grandmother sold her house and moved to Wiesbaden where the rest of my folks were and so on, and Tower wandered through all my test spreads in some way or another. So, when years later Tiger started bringing tarot cards as charries to Milliways, I knew right away tat the only one I could possibly pick was Tower. I always used Master Urban's old CD-ROM for his spreads at first; but shortly after Christmas 2007, I found the Orthodox Icon tarot, and I've been using that ever since, for Tower and in RL, and have been getting some spectacular results. That deck is Tower's deck; he's just letting me use it. As a tarot card, he's a very strong and generally known archetype who lives in many minds, an almost independent entitiy, and if I play him, he more or less just walks through me. None of my other charries, in Milliways or Morningstar Manor, is anything like that, so I do hesitate to play him often, because I quite like to rule my own brain.

Cats: I always thought myself a dog person, but in spring 2005, my upstairs neighbour in the old house which is now torn down got a cat, a female tabby, and I volunteered to look after her while they were on holiday, sometimes. I found that I really missed her for a bit after she'd gone home again, and started thinking about getting my own. In September 2006, my colleague Lena sent an email to everybody at work with the subject line 'Who wants a cat child?', and I went and raised my hand and said 'me'. Because we already had one tabby female in the house, I took the red male. That was Lucifer -- I got him on October 20th, and soon wondered why I had inflicted 39 cat-less year upon myself. Mephisto, I got from the same colleague last year, because I had been moved to the larger flat when the old house was torn down, and now had room for two cats. I thought Lucifer could use some company; he ended up doing the lion's share of the work in education Mephi, though. Mephi is clever and weird and very funny at times, and destructive at others (he had destroyed the folding screen in his first picture within the week!), but he never tried to touch my computer, like Luiifer had done, or hew cables. I had taught Lucifer in no uncertain terms that they are NO!!!; he must have taught his little brother. Yes, they're from the same mother. After a few days, they started loving each other dearly, and are very close.

Spiral: I think that means my tattoo of a heyiya-if, a symbol from Ursula LeGuin's experimental SF novel 'Always Going Home', which I am still amazed hasn't got a much larger fan base. It symbolises the world-view of her fictional post-apocalyptic tribe in Napa Valley, uniting dualism and holism, and I thought for years that, if I ever get a tattoo, it would have to be a heyiya-if. And then, in summer 2004, I did get it...

Italy: Munich gets nick-named 'the most northerly Italian city'. It's entirely natural to go to Italy for holidays, even short ones; and there's lots of Italians here, and decent Italian eateries and even bars. I have five within two minutes' walking distance. Going to Italy like I did last summer, to Verona and Ravenna, is obvious and simple, from a Munich point of view. Of course, I had picked going there for the sake of seeing places Teja had known, in particular, and we did see a dead Goth despite the fact Ravenna again tried to infuriate us; but all in all, I did the obvious Italian thing anybody from Munich seems to do from time to time.