Joined: Fri Sep 08, 2006 1:57 am
Posts: 1337
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Just strolling along, checking the forum for the evening... and... WHAT???
He's actually going to do this? And behind my back, too. I thought Kt had some confidence in me... well, I guess he's committed now. Or should be. I see your point, Tai.
Oh... what's this? A note taped to the door of the Secret Musical Skunk Works.
Ktahdn wrote: Well, yes, I may very well be nuts. You think I haven't considered the length of this thing? But, really, it's as long as it needs to be, given the various factors. I'll try to explain some of them.
When I was a kid I saw maps of Asia and wondered what was in that big central area that looked so empty. Eventually satellite images were available but they didn't help much; there's a lot of land in there. Then some years back I found, by accident, NHK's video series on the Silk Road, and the region began to come alive. People, towns farms, activity, life, music.
In the mid-1980s I heard Kitaro's Silk Road music and liked it, but didn't get around to buying it until the topic came up at a Music NIght get-together with friends. I bought the CDs and played them, which made for a nice evening. All it needed was more, to make it an evening, and in the years following I searched for music from the area.
The three-and-a-half hour presentation we did in Second Life last year for the Guild of Healers was the first result of that musical research. We had a good time... and it seemed folks wanted more. Well, I wanted more. I wanted to fill in some of the musical gaps. Also, some of the music in that playlist was rather more Western than seemed fitting, but it was all I had at the time.
This new playlist solves all of the problems, but as stories do it has grown in the telling. It now pushes 8 hours. I've always thought that if something is made well enough, people can demonstrate great patience, but in this one I'm asking for a lot even by my standards.
Still, it is not a marathon. The playlists are structured as a series of "days," morning, day, evening, night, each of which spans roughly a conceptual month of caravan travel. There are 8 days from Chang'an, China, to Istanbul, Turkey. This corresponds to a straight-through travel time of 8 months, which is about what a dedicated traveller would take. Most people would not do the whole trail, but would be traders moving back and forth between major trading centers.
So, we'll get up in the morning, pick up our camp, start moving, and proceed. In late afternoon we will approach the next camp area or caravanserai, where we can relax, eat dinner, and dance. You can come and go throughout the course of the journey, but I'll be narrating through text chat to help set the mood, so you may miss a few things.
I do hope you enjoy the trip. This is the first full-scale running of the rebuilt Journey, although I have reviewed it, and also played parts of it for various friends.
So, we don't really need to sit still for 8 hours. It's not a lecture. It's a celebration of passage, of journey, with all that implies. Good weather, bad weather, strange and new things, discomfort, sudden delight, things that we wish were over with already and things that are much too short.
_________________ Want to learn more about the D'ni? Look here: http://www.dpwr.net/
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