news [theljstaff]

Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more sifting through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. Please note that this still needs more tweaking, and we are working on the one-minute cut-off issue. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

stephanieburgis

• Snow! For the first time since I moved to the UK 8-1/2 years ago, we have what I would call a real winter snowfall. We've got 4 inches in our little Welsh town, and Maya goes mad with joy every time we let her out. She does high bunny-hops through the drifts, bites off snowballs and even throws them for herself! Watching her makes me laugh and laugh and feel pure happiness. (Plus, snow just inherently makes me happy, even here in the UK where it also makes things deeply inconvenient, since there's no real set-up for dealing with it, and therefore the trains stop running, many of the roads don't get salted, etc., etc. I don't care! It's snow, and it feels like magic every single time I step outside.)


• Book birthday! My friend Aliette's first book is being published in the UK and Australia TODAY, and I can't wait to read it. (I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon, and it still hasn't been dispatched. GRR. But still: book birthday!)
  
  
  Aliette is a fabulous writer (she was nominated for the Campbell award for best new SF/F writer last year!), and this book sounds absolutely awesome - a smart, dark, historical fantasy/mystery for adults set in the Aztec empire. It won't be published in the US until September, but you can order it from Amazon.co.uk - it's a paperback, so not too expensive to buy internationally. (You can also order it from The Book Depository for free, world-wide shipping as soon as it's back in stock - it seems to have sold out there at the moment.)
  
  You can go congratulate Aliette here, and you can also read the first three chapters of Servant of the Underworld on the blog My Favourite Books. (I probably would have bought the book even without this, because I have faith in Aliette's writing in any genre - but then I read Chapter One and pre-ordered immediately afterwards! :)
  
  Yay Aliette! Congratulations!


• I just made a new short story sale! The story is called "Speaking English", and it's a YA ghost story about Croatian immigrants to America. It sold to an Australian anthology, Belong (an anthology of spec-fic stories about immigration), which is due to come out in April. So now I have even more reasons to look forward to that month!


• And finally, reading the comments on the interview Ivana Marić posted with me yesterday made me really, really happy. I can't even begin to express how amazing it feels to hear people I don't even know saying that they're looking forward to my book. That really is magic - there's no other word for it.

aliettedb

Well, that’s it. I would seem to have become a published novelist. Today, my Aztec fantasy-mystery Servant of the Underworld hits the UK and Australia, courtesy of Angry Robot.

I can’t help flashing back to that time ten years ago, in London, when I first thought it would be awesome to write a fantasy in English–and all but killed the thought because my cynical self had just pointed out that fantasy was horribly complicated to write because of all that research, that English wasn’t my first language, and that I was bound to bungle it all. It took me ten years and a lot of wordage, but I’m awfully glad I decided to ignore the obstacles and go ahead anyway. Sometimes, things work out a zillion times better than you’d ever expected.

Year One-Knife, Tenochtitlan – the capital of the Aztecs. The end of the world is kept at bay only by the magic of human sacrifice. A priestess disappears from an empty room drenched in blood. Acatl, high priest, must find her, or break the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead. But how do you find someone, living or dead, in a world where blood sacrifices are an everyday occurrence and the very gods stalk the streets?

And there’s a new review over at Candyman:

…the author has thoroughly researched the language, customs, and such but uses it just enough to flavor her narrative, not over power it. The book reads more like a mystery rather than dark fantasy; either way, it’s very hard to put down. (…) This book is beautifully written and a pleasure to lose oneself in. (…) Please see for yourself and pick up a copy!!

Celebrating tonight with BF. Now all I need is an actual spotting of the book in the wild for it to feel real…

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

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aliettedb

This is part 4 of a series of posts on the setting of my Aztec fantasy series Obsidian and Blood, as a leadup to the release of Book 1, Servant of the Underworld, published by Angry Robot/HarperCollins (more information here, including excerpts and a book trailer). You can find part 1 (the Valley of Mexico) here, part 2 (the city of Tenochtitlan) here, and part 3 (about the Sacred Precinct and religion) here.

4. Acatl, and death in Mexica religion
My main character in the book is Acatl, High Priest for the Dead, who has the responsibility for investigating magical offences in the capital city of Tenochtitlan.

The word Acatl means “Reed”. It’s shorthand for his actual name, which is his date of birth in the calendar: Chiquacen Acatl, which means “The day Six Reed” [1]. I chose that name back when I was first writing “Obsidian Shards”, the very first story that featured him, for a number of reasons. The first is the association with the god Quetzalcoatl, Ce Acatl Topiltzin (see previous article)–who, among other things, was the patron of priests and of knowledge. The second is the symbolism of the day Six Reed itself: it has associations both with Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death (Acatl’s patron), and with the god of Justice–a fitting set of protectors for a death priest engaged in the investigation of magical crimes. [2]

Acatl’s patron is Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death. His name means “Lord of the Place of Death” (which I’ve shortened to “Lord Death” in the book for ease of reading), and he is one of the gods associated with the end of life. You can see a picture of him below, with the characteristic skeletal look.

The Aztec death system, like its religion, is complex. The basic idea is that there are several destinations for the spirits of the dead. What determines where someone ends up isn’t the respect of a particular morality (as in Christian religion). Instead, the only separating factor is the manner of death.

For those happy few who died in battle, their destination was Ilhuicatl Tonatiuh, the Heaven of the Sun. This included warriors who died on the battlefield, most sacrifice victims, as well as women who have died in childbirth. This last one can seem odd–but for the Mexica, childbirth was a struggle to bring a captive (the baby) into the world, an activity as dangerous as fighting other warriors in an effort to secure prisoners for sacrifice. Once ascended, the men would accompany the sun to its zenith; the women would then take over, from zenith to sunset. After four years, the spirits would come back into the mortal world: the men as butterflies, the women as moths. Below is a statue of a woman who has died in childbirth–transformed into a Cihuateteo, a fearsome female deity.

Another possible destination was Tlalocan, a watery paradise ruled by Tlaloc, the god of rain and storms. Those destined for Tlalocan had died of drowning, lightning strikes, and associated diseases (such as dropsy). There, they would enjoy the bliss of a land where crops bloomed year-long–Tlalocan is very much a peasants’ paradise, as Ilhuicatl Tonatiuh is that of warriors.

The babies who had died while still breastfeeding would go to Omeyocan, the Place of the Duality, where the supreme gods Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl would keep their spirits until they could be reborn after the end of the current age. In Omeyocan, the babies would suck the sap from a huge tree, as they had sucked milk from their mothers’ breasts. You might wonder what is the significance of breastfeeding: the answer is that it goes back to the link between blood and fertility. Those children are the ones who have never tasted the fruit of the earth–the fruit that have been sprouted thanks to the blood offerings of men. Hence, those babies have no debt either to the earth or the sun, and their spirits exist in a state much like the Christian state of grace.

You’ll notice that this barely covers any people at all. What of all the other spirits? The vast majority of people, those who did not fall into any of the categories outlined above, would go down into Mictlan, the Place of Death, or the underworld. This was a gloomy, cheerless place split over nine levels–from the entrance all the way down to the palace of Mictlantecuhtli and his consort Mictecacihuatl. On each of those levels, the spirit would face a gruelling trial. After four years of tribulation, the spirit reached the last level, where it was finally allowed to dissolve.

I adapted some of Mictlan’s trials into the underworld creatures Acatl deals with. The Wind of Knives, an elusive creature made of obsidian shards, corresponds to level five, where a wind as cutting as broken obsidian would tear the spirits apart. The beasts of shadows, with their taste for human hearts, come from level eight, where the spirit had to present a jade heart in order not have their own devoured by beasts.

Acatl himself takes on functions that pertain to all those places, since he investigates into magical crimes regardless of where the spirits might have gone (though he has access only to those spirits who have entered Mictlan, which can hinder him in his inquiries). I also gave him the more prosaic role of organising funerals, and helping the spirits’ passage into Mictlan. [3] Below is a particular form of funeral: a mummy bundle, which consists of putting the body in a foetal position, wrapping it in layers of clothes, and adding ornaments such as jade stones (the manner of disposing of the body also depended on the manner of death, but I’ll not go into details here).

And that concludes this series of articles about Aztec history–remember, Servant of the Underworld is out today if you want to check out what I did with all this nifty research. (order now–tell your friends–etc. :=) )

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

Leave a comment at original post, or comment here.

aliettedb

This is part 3 of a series of posts on the setting of my Aztec fantasy series Obsidian and Blood, as a leadup to the release of Book 1, Servant of the Underworld, published by Angry Robot/HarperCollins (more information here, including excerpts and a book trailer). You can find part 1 (the Valley of Mexico) here and part 2 (the city of Tenochtitlan) here.

Any questions or comments welcome!

3. The Sacred Precinct
Just as the valley of Mexico was the heart of the Empire, so the Sacred Precinct was that of Tenochtitlan. Its function was simple: to serve as the religious and ceremonial centre for the city.

Within the Serpent Wall that delimitated its boundaries, the Sacred Precinct included the major temples of Mexica gods, areas for specific sacrifices, and the houses and schools for priests. Its size was staggering–500m to a side, probably the reason why the Spanish maps of Tenochtitlan give it such a prominent (and distorted) place.

Mexica religion is a complex field, not least because the only information we have about gods came through the Spanish friars, who tended to be biased on such a fundamental subject. There are dozens of Mexica gods, each with several aspects: Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, the god of war and fate, is also Yaotl, the Enemy, and Telpochtli, the Male Youth, patron of the education of young warriors. The sum of those aspects are often referred to as “complexes”: though the gods have separate names and aspects, they take their root in the same basic concept.

To understand the Mexica relationship with their gods, it’s once again necessary to go back–this time to the beginning of the current age[1]. When the sun first rose in the sky, it remained motionless, transfixing the land with its deadly rays. The gods, seeing that the sun was hungry, sacrificed themselves and gave him their blood, so that creation might go on. Men are thus macehualli, “born through divine sacrifice”, and, because the (dead) gods can no longer feed the sun with blood, that most sacred of duties falls to mankind.

Sacrifice to the Mexica was not cruelty or mere bloodthirstiness–rather, it was a fundamental act, continuously keeping the end of the world at bay. It was a ritual, and even in the aspects that horrify us the most, the point wasn’t to cause pain for pain’s sake: the Mexica did not practise torture, and were horrified when the Spanish had such casual recourse to it. Rather, a sacrifice victim became a substitute/incarnation for the god, recreating the fundamental sacrifice the gods had made at the beginning of time–giving their blood for the sun and the continuation of the current age.

Of all the gods of the pantheon, the two most important ones had place of pride in the Sacred Precinct: the largest building there was the Great Temple (Templo Mayor), a twin pyramid dedicated to Tlaloc, the god of rain and storms, and to Huitzilpochtli, the tribal god of the Mexica. Tlaloc, characterised by his google-eyes and by the fangs protruding from his mouth, was an old divinity (traces of him are found as far back as Teotihuacan, a millenium before the Mexica). Huitzilpochtli, a youthful man with a blue-green hummingbird headdress and a black mask around his eyes, was a newer god, elevated to supreme rank and twinned with Tonatiuth, the Fifth Sun, the provider of light and upholder of the world’s order. He was a god of war to whom prisoners were sacrificed; celebrated during numerous festivals. Below are images of both, drawn from various Mexica codices.

Two other gods also had large temples: the first was Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, god of war, fate and rulership. It was before Tezcatlipoca that a new Emperor would meditate and do penance before being crowned. Tezcatlipoca was a capricious god, as likely to curse as to help–another of his associations was with sorcerers, the dark ones who used potions and body-parts to poison men, rob houses and despoil innocent people.

The second, and the last one I’ll mention in this very short introduction, is Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. Under the name Ce Acatl Tolpitzin, he had been the ruler of the legendary Toltec city Tulla–his reign a golden age with no sicknesses, famines or human sacrifices. His temple in the Sacred Precinct honoured him as Ehecatl, the god of wind: it was a round tower without any asperities, so that it would not break the wind’s course as it sped through Tenochtitlan.

Among the other curiosities of the Sacred Precinct was the temalaccatl, or gladiator stone, where a captive warrior was given wooden weapons to fight against other, better-armed warriors until he finally succumbed; and the Jaguar and Eagle Houses, communal places for the elite warriors, those who had captured more than four prisoners on the battlefield. [2] My main character’s brother Neutemoc is a Jaguar Knight, and he would have looked much like the one depicted below: a full bodysuit made of a jaguar’s skin, the helmet worked out of the animal’s head so that the warrior’s own head protruded from between the teeth of the jaguar.

Though the emperor was the closest thing to a god on earth, standing for the authority of Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilpochtli, he did not live within the Sacred Precinct, but rather just outside it. We have evidence of several palaces built along the Serpent Wall, bordering the Precinct: that of Axayacatl (1469-1480), Ahuizotl (1486-1502) and Moctezuma II (1502-1519). It’s not clear whether the other emperors chose to inhabit a predecessor’s palace, or whether we haven’t yet found evidence of other constructions.

Those palaces were huge compounds, spread over a square kilometre or more: as well as a living space for the emperor and his family and the other members of the Triple Alliance, they also housed the courts of appeals, the workshops of imperial artists such as featherworkers, and goldsmiths, the treasury that held the tribute from the whole empire, and many other administrative functions of the empire. There were separate courts for civilians and the military, and the emperor acted as the supreme appeal. Those courts obviously play a large part in the book, which is focused on investigations and their consequences.

That’s all for today. Come back tomorrow for the final article, on my main character Acatl, and the Mexica approach to death (and the book launch, of course )

Cross-posted from Aliette de Bodard

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