owlmoose: a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge, shrouded by fog (golden gate bridge)

In my writing goals post for the month, I said I was going to try and do some gameblogging for Horizon Forbidden West, but I've discovered that I'd rather be spending my free time playing the game than writing about it. Also, it's hard to easily mark spoilers in a post about an open world game, because just naming a main quest doesn't signal what sidequests might be mentioned in there, or vice versa. And even just the name of the main quest we're working on right now is spoilery for anyone who has played the first game but not the second. But the primary thing I want to talk about now isn't really plot related, it's more about the environment, and it's spoiled by both the box art and the trailer, so I feel pretty safe in talking about it. Still under a cut, thought.

On heading through the Lowlands to Landfall, includes some details about the Landfall tallneck, also spoilers for HZD. )

Notre Dame

Apr. 15th, 2019 06:14 pm
owlmoose: icon by <user site="livejournal.com" name="parron"> (ffx - mi'ihen sunset)
Like many people, I spent today transfixed by horror and sadness as Notre Dame de Paris burned. As of this writing, it seems that the main stone structure has been saved; there are conflicting reports as to how extensive the damage to the interior might be. The wooden roof is definitely gone, along with the iconic spire and at least one of the rose windows. (I was particularly struck by this photo of the fire, a moment of surprising beauty in a time of deep sadness.)

I went to Paris once, in 2001. Our hotel was just down the river from the Louve, so also quite near Notre Dame, and we saw it from the outside pretty much every day, just walking around. We also toured the inside, and although it wasn't the cathedral I was most excited to see at the time (that would be our day trip to Chartres), I was still moved and overwhelmed by its beauty, and by the sense of history. We always meant to get back to Paris someday, but we never have so far. Now it's hard to imagine it. As a former student of architecture, I experience a city through its buildings, and it's impossible to picture Paris without Notre Dame -- just as I can't think of a Rome without the Colosseum, or a London without Big Ben, or a San Francisco without the Bay Bridge. Notre Dame isn't gone, but it is forever changed, and it's okay to grieve what's been lost.

(I mistyped the subject line as "Notre Damn", and I almost kept it that way, but decided it would be too disrespectful. Yet it seems an appropriate sentiment in a way. So I immortalize the typo in this note instead.)

Plans!

Mar. 22nd, 2009 10:43 pm
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Lately (if by lately, you mean "for the last several months"), T and I have been discussing a possible a trip to Italy. In theory, we try to take an international trip every other year, but it hasn't worked out that way, largely because we were planning to go on a family trip to China last year, which then fell through. So we turned our sights back toward Europe. I've wanted to go to Italy for very many years. I still remember sitting in class with JR, first in Form of the City, but also in pretty much every architecture class we took together, looking at slides of temples and palaces and piazzas and nudging each other: "Let's go there. And there. And there, and there." Thanks to my trips to Paris, Barcelona, and Japan, I've now been to some of those places. But so many of those pictures were taken in Italy. And of those, many of the most compelling were in Rome. So Rome has been at the top of my "places to go before I die" list for a long, long time.

Today, we booked a hotel and a flight. Leaving at the end of April, going for a week. Right now we're only planning on Rome, although a day trip to Pompeii or somewhere else within a do-able bus ride could be in the cards. We have a little time to plan.

After all this time talking about it, thinking about it, dreaming about it, now it looks like it's really going to happen. I don't quite believe it yet, though. Probably I won't actually believe it until I'm sitting on the plane.
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Today I have been immersed in art, architecture, and city planning. We didn't make it to the art museum in the morning, or rather, we did, but it was closed and wouldn't be opening for two hours. So instead we decided to check out some of Denver's public art, notably the Big Blue Bear (not his real name) who peers into the big windows of the conference center. (The artist, Lawrence Argent, spoke to us on Saturday morning, it was a really fascinating presentation.) Then, after a side trip to an excellent bookstore, I sat in on probably my favorite session of the conference so far, a presentation on problems of city and land-use planning in the Mountain West and in Denver in particular. One of the speakers was Denver's city planning manager, and he was a fantastic speaker -- engaging, funny, informative. That was followed by a talk on the design of the new addition to the Denver Art Museum, which was a good mix of speakers: an architecture librarian who gave a critical overview, one of the architects who worked on the building, and a museum educator who works there now. This would have interested me pretty much any time, but it was especially great today because our dinner was a party in this same museum, and I really enjoyed having some context for the space.

I am kicking myself for forgetting to bring a camera.

Also, I miss my kitties.

Picspam!!

May. 27th, 2007 01:16 pm
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In honor of the 70th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge, have some photos. And I threw in some kitties, as long as I was at it. ;) All photos by T.

Update: I am informed that the bridge photos I uploaded were not properly resized, and you should look at these versions instead.

Tori being cute )

Lexi being cuter )

The Golden Gate Bridge being awesome )
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It's been approximately a million zillion years since I put up cat photos. They're still cute and all, but it's true that they aren't kittens any more, and T has been experimenting with other kinds of photography. That doesn't mean there aren't still awesome kitty pics to share, though.

Here, let's have some. )

Full size in the gallery.

Plus, bonus fuzziness! )

In other news, finals are approaching, which leads to all the usual craziness. Stressed students, meetings all over the place, printers breaking down. Not to mention my boss being out on vacation. (Like one of the students said to me today, "She gets Paris, and you get finals." I don't begrudge her the trip, at all, it was a timing thing she couldn't control. Still, the kid has a point.) Just another week in the library!
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Walking back home from the car tonight, I passed a MUNI bus that was out of service. Its destination?

"Nowhere in Particular"

No camera, alas. I'll have to keep my eye out in the future.
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Now this is cool. A database of historic and significant campus architecture.

Bryn Mawr is well represented, of course. I lived in this building for two years (freshman and senior).

There are those who say that Bryn Mawr looks like Princeton, sharing the Collegiate Gothic style. The same architects (Cope & Stewardson) designed a lot of the core buildings, so there is something to that. However, architectural historians agree that the first-ever Collegiate Gothic building is Radnor, a BMC dorm (where I also lived, as a sophmore). So it's not so much that Bryn Mawr looks like Princeton, as that Princeton looks like Bryn Mawr. Take that, patriarchy! ;)

I do love looking at pictures of the old alma mater. It was such a beautiful place to be.
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Some of you may have heard about KFC putting their logo in a Nevada town in such a way that it would be visible from a plane. (I saw the link in [livejournal.com profile] kunstarniki's LJ, but I'm sure it also made the rounds in other ways.)

That was bad enough. This is much scarier.

Golden Gate Bridge to explore corporate sponsorship options.

I am at a total loss here. What can they possibly be thinking?!
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I may have mentioned before that we live right around the corner from SBC Park, the baseball stadium where the SF Giants play. On Thursday and Friday nights (actually throughout the week), a ski jump was constructed in the ballpark for a big event yesterday -- they brought in artificial snow for a winter sports exhibition. The ridiculousness of such a thing aside, T was taken with the way the place looked, so those two nights he pulled out the camera and took a little fieldtrip. (I joined him on Thursday, to keep him company and carry the tripod.) Here are some of the pictures.

Ski jumps in improbable places, boats in the dark, and other night photography )

Several more, including more of the boats, in the gallery.

City pics!

Sep. 27th, 2006 11:23 pm
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T has taken some really neat San Francisco photos over the last several days. Behind the cut. )

And a cat picture for good measure. )
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The SF Bay Bridge is currently undergoing a huge renovation to bring it up to modern seismic standards. It's been going on for years and is scheduled to finish sometime in 2009. (This is just the retrofit of the San Francisco side. The new bridge, the Oakland side, is also under construction and probably won't be done until 2016 at the earliest.) Over the Labor Day weekend, they demolished a small portion of the upper deck. In order to do this, they had to close the bridge in the eastbound direction entirely, for the whole long weekend. It's supposed to reopen at 5am tomorrow.

Since we only live two blocks from the demolition site, of course we had to go take a look. T, a big fan of large-scale construction and demolition projects, took several pictures. Here are some of them. )

As I was pulling these pictures together, I noticed that the distant sound of jackhammers had stopped for the first time since very early Saturday morning. They're back now, intermittently, along with the dumptrucks taking away all the debris. We've been able to hear the noise from the bridge retrofit off and on almost since I started living here, in 2000, and for the most part I'm used to it. Still, headphones can be a blessing.

And now, for something completely different: Lexi climbing the walls!
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John King ([livejournal.com profile] johnkingsfgate) has an excellent tribute to Jane Jacobs, in which he also presents some fine jabs at faceless suburban development. I'm not opposed to development when it's done right, but this sounds like development done wrong, which drives me oh so crazy.

Also, [livejournal.com profile] steluch shares her thoughts on Ms. Jacobs as well.
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Pre-eminent urban scholar Jane Jacobs dies.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which she wrote in 1961, is still the classic work on city neighborhoods -- how they work, what makes them living and vibrant and real. It's one of the few college textbooks I kept, and I still pull it out when I want to make a point about planning. Her legacy is secure, but the Cities world will miss her.
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Ganked from [livejournal.com profile] cosmorific and [livejournal.com profile] iamleaper, who both beat me by a long shot.

So, like, am I one of the popular kids? )

It's cold and overcast here today. Yesterday was nicer -- T and I took a walk down the waterfront and wandered around Embarcadero Center for awhile. There's a mall that's in trouble; seemed like there were more empty storefronts than open ones. T and I exchanged theories as to why, including problems with circulation, isolation from the neighborhood, and competition from the Ferry Building. We also hit the Ferry Building briefly, although it was late afternoon so the farmer's market was long done. Mostly it was an excuse to get out of the house and soak up some sunshine. Fresh air is a good thing.

Oh yeah, more lines.
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(More lines.)

Here's a cool thing that T found -- some folks took a metered parking space in downtown SF and turned it into a little park for the day, complete with grass and a bench.

A picture behind the cut. )

There are more pictures, along with a map and detailed instructions for constructing your own, on the site. What a neat idea. I wish I'd seen it in person.
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(More lines here. Just one song left. C'mon you guys, this is a classic! Someone must know it. Update: And someone did. All songs answered! Wow.)

Last night, T and I dropped by the grand re-opening of the de Young Museum. This art museum was closed for several years so that they could construct a new building -- the old one was seismically unsound. Before the old building shut its doors, they opened it for a twenty-four hour museum marathon. We had attended the farewell party, so we thought that it was only appropriate to attend the welcoming as well. We left the house around 11pm and, after some parking adventures, arrived at the museum perhaps fifteen minutes before midnight.

It was a mob scene. Literally. The line to get in extended into the night and out of our sight. We didn't even bother finding the end of it. We took a glance into the galleries through the picture windows and they weren't visably crowded, so they must have been enforcing some sort of "one-in one-out" policy. So we spent some time walking around, looking at the grounds and the building. I'm looking forward to getting a closer look at it someday -- the new building is highly controversial, the design provoking wails of agony from San Franscisans everywhere. For a city that takes its identity from a reputation for open-mindedness, the design sense of the populace is amazingly stodgy. I found the tower, the main source of complaint, to be quite striking, lit up at night. Apparently the galleries are well designed. We'll probably go check it out in a few months, after the buzz dies down a little.

The crowd was an odd mix of art types, people looking for a party, and the merely curious. I wonder if there will be a backlash from the art community -- "those club kids ruined our opening!" Only time and op-eds will tell.
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The friend committee has jump-started my common sense and convinced me that a doctor's appointment is necessary. I'll call first thing tomorrow.

In other news, my offramp from the Bay Bridge closed today. For three years. I used this thing to get home from work every day, and now it's gone. According to Caltrans, only 10,000 cars a day use the exit, but I was in one of those cars, dammit! I drove myself on it for the last time on Friday, and it was a weird thought.

It's all part of the earthquake retrofit, which is necessary work, but three years?

You are all invited to view the Harrison Street Offramp Memorial Photo Gallery.
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Last Thursday night, T and I left for four days in Los Angeles. The stated reason for the trip was T's ten-year architecture school reunion on Saturday, and he very much enjoyed reconnecting with his old friends, but it was also an excuse to spend some time in LA. T is an Angeleno by birth and upbringing, and he is quite fond of his home city. For many years, I had the typical Northern Californian attitude of smug superiority toward Los Angeles, but the more I visit, the better I like the place. I never expected LA to become one of my favorite cities, but it really is.

Some photographs and perhaps way too much detail here. )

The complete photo gallery is here. This is my first experiment with using the gallery so I hope it all came out all right.

lost city

Aug. 31st, 2005 10:13 am
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Somehow I ended up not paying any attention to the news yesterday, so the first time I really registered the extent of the devastation in New Orleans was this morning, when I came downstairs and saw the headlines on issues of the SF Chronicle and New York Times sitting by the mailboxes. Now I'm reading news stories and looking at pictures and trying to comprehend it all, and failing miserably.

I've seen a great deal of the US but somehow I have never managed to make it to New Orleans. (This is where E steps up and reminds me of all the times he's invited me to go there with him. To which all I can say is: you're right. I should have made it work at least once.) As a student of architecture and a lover of cities, this is the aspect of these tragedies that I often end up focusing on. The human toll is too much, too terrible, too difficult to conceptualize. Easier to grieve for the beautiful cemeteries, the old buildings, the cityscape. It was much the same after 9/11 -- the loss of life was awful and I felt it, but it was too distant to really mourn in any personal way. I knew the Twin Towers; they were old friends. I had visited them and studied them and always meant to climb to the top of them someday (I never made it up there, either). It was the loss I felt most keenly that day and during the weeks following. If that makes me cold and heartless so be it.

My thoughts are with anyone who has friends or family down there, or who loves the city and is grieving its loss.

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