It don’t come natural…

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Mary Beth Frezon

Working on “The Hobbit,” though, has radically changed how she readies herself for a role. “I can’t just be spontaneous, because there is nothing natural about being an elf,” Lilly said. “It’s not human, so I have to study to learn what it means to be this other creature.”
This means Lilly has had to train to walk, talk, and, of course, fight like an elf. She said, “So, on top of my stunt training — which I need to learn how to be proficient with the bow and arrow, and with daggers, and in fighting orcs that are, you know, ten feet tall — I also have to learn the language of Elvish, and I have to learn an RP [Received Pronunciation] neutral English accent for when I speak English.” When you add in learning to move and gesture like an elf, Lilly figures she has spent “four times as much time preparing as I do actually shooting.”

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40 to go

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Mary Beth Frezon

20120130-144542.jpg

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Forty-six squares

Posted on January 30, 2012 by Mary Beth Frezon

Forty-six squares of green off the wall
Forty-six squares off the wall
If one of those squares should happen to fall
I’m just going back to bed, that is all.

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Blogging-Geeks unite

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Mary Beth Frezon

I’m pretty low down on the geek ladder, but I’m pretty far up on the blogging one. Reading this made me flash back to all my early Tripod Volunteer Management days. Ah, the excitement and promise of community building. That intersection of virtual and real world. Well then it was a little more about the community inside the virtual world. I found some of the same sense in the early Blogger days. Finding the same aura around the NaNoWriMo world too.

My own experience of virtual meets IRL worlds extends even longer than my blogging experience, going back to my time with online quilt groups. When the quilt world met the virtual world there was all kinds of unexpected unknown and as-yet-unrealized geekiness unleashed on the world. It was pretty heady stuff.

Some folks I know now, I met in the early ICQ days when we’d have rolling-time-zone pajama parties sharing recipes for favorite snack foods and patterns and fun as the night moved from one time zone to the next. How fun was that? A lot of fun. And amazing to think that you were chatting with people from around the world, who shared your interests and in many ways all the life things that young women share.

From that came many quilt web sites and email lists. I belonged to a few then and I belong to a few now. My interest comes and goes for the bigger ones like QuiltArt and others. The big ones are generally not as much fun or as sharing as they used to be. I don’t spend time wondering why and won’t waste yours. I still read and watch the evolution with interest.

But I’m still in touch with a small group of folks I met in those early days, from across the world. We actually met once in California, and some met more times than that. We’re the old friends who can pick up where ever we last left the conversation – we’ve got the background and can fill in the blanks quickly.

So carry on, WordPress folks. You’ve done much to promote the idea of sharing and open source development for years and I salute you for it. Building virtual community and melding it with real life is never ever a bad thing.

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Sunday as a poor substitute for Friday

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Mary Beth Frezon

One of the things I won’t miss about retail is the damnable scheduling. Sunday is a poor substitute for Friday. The majority of the people I know hold to a Monday through Friday work week and wonder why us retail hacks aren’t able to do things with them. I’ve been doing this way too long to lose any sleep over this anymore and I try to make the best of it.

Today was the end of six days of increasing silliness and strangeness and a few days of being mildly and weirdly (for me) sick. I’m not sick sick. But I am sick. I don’t know what to say other than some mysterious GI-something-or-other. Oh well. I’m swigging the ginger brew again tonight. It’s tasty and not sweet and it’s appealing, whether or not it actually does anything good for me other than making me less queasy.

So tomorrow I have to do some banking and then I must sew together the 46 squares needed to make the seasonal palette top big enough. What a silly thing.

So it’s time to pay the taxes and pay for the car’s license renewal. Such exciting grown up stuff. I bet faeries don’t have to do either of those things.

So here’s the bit of something from Quote Box:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. … The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. — William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech

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