administrative details...

Claire has just made me sign up for something called linked in by way of getting my brother into the network. (and I mean, I'm totally on there under false pretenses, as they made me pick an industry, and didn't *have* anything resembling archaeology) They seem to have a pretty extensive reference network, with a fair number of fields represented. I can see it being a good tool when I want to move on to something besides digging holes in the ground.

Anyway, is anyone either a) on there who I should link to (I already did a search of Obies from while I was there) or b) interested in having an invite? Let me know...

and back (perhaps) to writing stuff

so that novel? yeah, I've finally dragged out the mesoamerican mythology book I re-borrowed from fishy1. And been reminded how annoying it is. I worked directly from the book last time, so there aren't any notes to guide me on what I was using, and let's see... The index sporadically lists things that are spoken about in the scholarly analysis portions of the book, but if you want to look up anything in the actual texts, it's flip through the entire book, and hope you actually know what you're looking for, and will find it on the way past. In any case, I'm pretty sure I was working from two different texts last time (a Mayan and an Aztec version of the same story) and now I can only find one of them.

Although I did find the really creepy picture of the flayed god ceramic sculpture, that looks like something eating a plastic baby doll from the inside out... perhaps I will have to make one, with a real baby doll. Although on the whole it's slightly less creepy than the ritual "autosacrifice" stuff which includes people bleeding their penises in a ritual gender-blurring simulation of childbirth. Except that of course terribly important women will do their own gender-blurring ritual bleeding that simulates the men simulating childbirth... and then you just have to go and hide under something because it's way too weird and confusing, and you were really reading this book to find out about the afterlife anyway.