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[chess]

There was an ODC. I actually enjoyed myself quite a lot. Despite the faceplanting in the forest and the busted toe resulting, which confined me to the Plot Tent for much of the proceedings. Now my brain is insufficiently functional to perform useful actions so I am having an Enforced Rest Day, so here is a meme. If any of you want me to ask you five questions, or have questions for me, please do comment below :).

From theviciouspixie

1) Which creature comforts would you really struggle to do without?

All of them? I am incredibly rubbish at discomfort and just fall completely to pieces when not kept in the style to which I have become accustomed. Being at the wrong temperature, in uncomfortable clothes, or without comfortable sleeping accommodation (with walls! and a roof! buildings are very important to me) basically utterly cripple me and reduce me to a shuffling, whining shadow of myself.

I'm not sure how far 'creature comforts' extend; I would find it relatively easy (if sad, as eating good food is a reliable source of happiness) to make do with a simple or even unappetizing diet (as long as it didn't actually make me ill), I am not bothered by cramped living conditions (I will quite happily sleep on a mattress on a floor in a room of snoring people, for instance), I am not that fussy about sharing my life with piles of garbage and their attendant insects / smell, I am not particularly attached to physical possessions (although I do need access to some means of Writing Stuff Down from time to time to avoid insanity; I don't necessarily even need to keep the results though).

2) Which country (real or otherwise) would you most like to visit and what would you do whilst you were there?

I'm not really convinced I'm cut out for visiting countries. I generally prefer to remain relatively stationary and let other worlds come to me. As above, extremes of temperature knock me right out, which rules out quite a lot of travelling.

Interestingly I love the actual _act_ of travelling - car journeys, train journeys, bus journeys, airplane journeys, boat journeys, even journeys on foot. It's like the forced separation from the everyday world gives me a rare opportunity to truly relax; to watch the scenery go by, to read a book, to listen to music, to just do nothing of consequence without feeling bad about all the things I'm not doing because I am already Doing Something (going from A to B) and anything else is a bonus. (Also, transport technology still inspires and fascinates me and reminds me that I am Living In The Future.)

So - somewhere temperate, which gives good scenery, where I would wander around and stare at things, and maybe eat nice food if I can be sure of adequate translation. The thing is, few places fit this bill better than Scotland, which has the added advantage of my grandmother-in-law, so there is little call for me to go anywhere else; but this doesn't seem to be in the spirit of the question which is usually answered about _new_ places I _haven't_ been before.

I do have this idea for a prehistoric-setting LARP that won't go away though; obviously I wouldn't want to visit that world literally (see above under 'not liking uncomfortable clothing or sleeping accommodations, liking buildings') but I would like to create it for visitation metaphorically one day...

3) Which three little-known bands do you love and why do you think more people should know about them?

I am so immensely out of touch with music that I have no idea whether bands that I love are little-known or not; I get into all of my music through either my father, having heard it a long time ago, or recommendations from other LARPers or people from my church.

So I'm going to list three that I like quite a lot and appear to be small niche bands, but I may well be terribly embarrassed to discover that one of them is incredibly popular and not little-known at all!

The first on this list is obviously Jars of Clay, who are consistently my favourite specifically-Christian band. I am sure I have gone on at great length about them before; they have a wide and interesting musical repertoire (swerving between folk, indie and rock, often within the same album and sometimes within the same song) and their lyrics are deep, thoughtful, certainly not all cheerleading / worship / happy-clappy or avoiding acknowledgement of doubt and the darker sides of life and hard questions, which can sometimes afflict music of this niche.

I try to sneakily play and recommend them to all of my friends at all opportunities, because I genuinely think listening to them is likely to make your life better, even if you don't share the faith I share with them and which they often sing about.

The second odd corner of my music collection I'd like to introduce you to is Escape Key. Be careful with this one as there is another band called Escape Key who are entirely different :-). Escape Key only have one album that I am aware of, called Shadowbeast. They are something I would describe as 'excellent LARP music' - simple but beautiful guitar-and-singer tunes often with strong choruses and generally fantasy-themed. More people should know about them because I would love to hear more reproductions or slight filks of this stuff around campfires!

Along similar but slightly more 'robust' lines is the music of Leslie Fish, who isn't technically a band but a filk-singer. Some of her stuff is her own or written specifically for her, some of it is the kind of thing that would be marked 'trad.' in a hymnbook because it has passed through so many hands, and everything in between. She does have a bit of an unfortunate libertarian / evangelising-atheist streak, but her settings of various Kipling pieces are among some of my favourite songs.

Again, I think more people should have these so that they can be used for communal singing at LARPs and other gatherings of my tribe - often being filk originally and all done in that style, they are excellent pick-up songs, and I generally just can't get enough casual communal singing in my life, even if I'm not great at it :-).

4) What is your strongest memory associated with a smell?

I've never really understood the 'memories associated with smells' thing. The memories I have associated with smells are all very specific memories _of_ smells or tastes - so a smell will remind me of a kind of food or a particularly smelly place I was in once, but it is unlikely to extend to an entire scene / run of memories around that area or item like I hear reported from other people.

My memory tends to work on visuals instead; seeing a bluebell, or a tree viewed from underneath, or one of my fading scars, will trigger a cascade of memories much as smell is reported to do for other people. Sometimes it works on audible cues too, but mostly just songs which are linked to incidents in my head because my brain often plays a continual soundtrack out of my music collection or because I wrote the incidents down using the song as a framework.

So, alas, my strongest memory associated with a smell at the moment is the truly hideous stench that pervaded the blue cargo container loo at the last Maelstrom event :-).

5) If machines could talk, what do you think they would say?

Machines talk all the time. They hum; they buzz; they rumble. Some of them I can even understand a little at times, the whine of an unhappy computer, the struggling bumping noise of the car engine almost out of fuel, the continual communion with the engine hum of my car telling me when to change its gears or ease up on the poor thing.

If they could talk in words, I imagine they would communicate much the same information, just as if an animal could talk in words - in fact I don't really draw much distinction between animals and machines, if anything often I feel a lot more empathy and sympathy with the latter than the former.

So they would express their simple needs, their general status, their unhappiness at mistreatment or their contentment in proper use...