(no subject)

Oh, man. I don't imagine I realised how tense I was for most of yesterday, but I'm feeling it today. I woke up this morning and every muscle in my body ached. I haven't been this sore since the car accident last year.

Which is fine, because all I plan to do today is some icon-making, a photo post, and a little work on the masks -- I still have one Death Eater to finish up, and I've been working on some faux-painting for a couple of "headstone" masks inspired by New England skull engravings. One of which I may have to keep, because they're coming out really very neat, shapewise.

It's nice, too, that now I'm able to preserve the components of any given mask mold because I've covered Snapely in plastic wrap, so instead of sticking to his plaster, the clay snaps off in complete pieces for re-use if I want to change up what I'm doing.

So in addition to all the masks, I now have some very eerie clay outlines for a Death Eater and a skull with wings. Also several sizes of nose.

And my second armature arrived, but I'm going to have to reinforce the rather flimsy plastic with plaster or she'll crack. I'm thinking of calling her Tonksy. :D

(no subject)

They've cracked the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Oh my fucking god.

"In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it [infrared technology] to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament.

[...]

Scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence."

And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep. -- Sophocles, "The Progeny"

No one has read these words in at least a thousand years. Possibly twenty-five hundred.

"Oh, Septimus! -- can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by Cleopatra’s ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?"
"By counting our stock. Seven plays for Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, dear lady! Life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language..."
-- Tom Stoppard, Arcadia