Chichen Itza, Yaxchilán, Uxmal, Tikal and Palenque

I woke up lateish.

Well, I splept in. And then woke up lateish.

But teachers tend to be forgiving on the first day of class or whatever. So that's good.

The only class I had today was Bro Raish's Art of Mesoamerica, or, uh, "Meso-American Art," as it's listed, but Bro Raish says that BYU-I is the only place in the world that spells with the hyphen and the internal capitalization. (It's kind of a rare thing. Attestations of that sort of thing elsewhere: Spider-Man. And that's it.) Mesoamerican art, anyway, yeah. Which class goes on this wise: we choose how we get credit, like we can watch documentaries on ancient Mesoamerica, or read books on ancient Mesoamerica, or watch movies on ancient Mesoamerica, or whatever.

The kind of cwazy thing is, the media you intake, doesn't really need to be all that accurate. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is one of the acceptable films to watch ("the plot revolves around Aztec-style crystal skulls that beckon the adventurer to a Maya-style pyramid in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest," the syllabus informs us.) The Aztecs story arch of the classic Doctor Who show, another one (at least Doctor Who was trying vaguely to be educational back then.) That one episode of Castle with the Mayan mummy ("whatever that is," Brother Raish quips)? It's totally one of the options. I mean, obviously we have to view these things with a critical eye, do writeups after whatever it is that we choose to do, but it's a pretty get-credit-however-you-want-to class, on top of the exams, which even themselves aren't mandatory but sure the cuss get you way more points by themselves than any other one thing does.

What I'm most excited for, though, out of the non-exam type ways of interacting with Mesoamerican art and culture, is the board games.

There's three that Brother Raish keeps in his office which we're free to borrow: Alan D Ernstein's Palenque, from Z-Man Games; the ancient pan-Mesoamerican gambling game of Patolli (the word "Patolli" itself is Aztec ("bean"!), but there's attestations of the game's existence before that); or, the one I'm definitely the most intrigued/excited to play, the 1999 Spiel de Jahres winner, Tikal. It looks incredible, all right: you're competing as archaeologists exploring the jungle, worker-placing, area-controlling, action-point-allowing all the way. There's hexes and wooden peg thingies and cardboard temple pieces you stack into pyramids as you explore them and it just looks amazing, and like something I would be relatively good at.

Tikal is apparently the first of a trilogy of games all of similar theme made by the same dudes (the "Mask Trilogy,") and I can think of a few other board games also dealing with ancient Mesoamerica (it's one of the Palenque dude's favorite subjects,) so out of all the Mesoamerican-based tabletopping in the world, it's disappointing but not surprising that Tzolk'in isn't one of the games Bro Raish keeps in his office. (Good luck getting students who'd check that game out not to lose any pieces or damage the moving parts...!) Still should mention it to him, maybe?

In other news, I don't know about you guys, but "A Skunk Is A Skunk" (Skunsek To Skunks?) is still stuck in my head... what makes it even worse is that originally I'd posted up that video on Wednesday, but the embed didn't go through for whatever reason so I did it again yesterday, and so that's three days of having that stuck in my ear instead of probably just one for you all...