![[icon]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/47803105/441887) |
Rowyn
|
| Because all the cool kids are doing it.
Yes, I'm a spell-spinner. You know how to spin spells, don't you? No?
Okay, then, I'll tell you.
First, you'll need some harvested magic. You can buy pre-packaged magic at most any Craft store, but I like to harvest my own. Some people say it doesn't make a difference, but most of the best spell-weavers say you get better results if you can do all the steps yourself. You should at least know how to harvest.
To harvest, you start by combing all the old unabsorbed wild magic out of your aura. You might be able to use some of that to spin, but usually if it's been tangled up in your aura for a while it'll be too friable to work with. So, look at your aura. See those little things floating around in it, like bits of glittery fur drifting below the surface of a lake? Yes, those. Comb them all out. You can use an aura comb or your fingers -- I always use an aura comb for this part. Once you've gotten all of the bits out, throw them away, unless you want to try salvaging them to spin.
Next, get dressed up in your shiniest clothing. Yes, really. Why do you think the stereotype of a wizard has him wearing a robe covered in stars? Magic is attracted to glitter and shine, so you want to wear something with a lot of gleam to it. You don't need to go totally overboard here -- sequins head to toe are overkill. It won't hurt, mind you, but a vinyl outfit with some polished studs or an evening dress with a nice pattern of rhinestones is just as good. Expensive jewelry is fine, but so is cheap junk as long as it shines. So you want glossy gold and silver tones, for instance, not buff ones. Magic doesn't have particularly good taste.
Now, clench your aura down tight. Pull it in as close to your body as you can. No, tighter than that. As if you were trying to stop someone else from using a spell on you. Didn't you ever get into spell fights when you were a kid? You don't want your aura loose and soft and open like translucent smoke drifting around you, but tight, hard, closed, like a layer of polished glass covering your skin. Yes, that's better. Practice at it, it's a good skill to have even if you're not harvesting magic.
And now you're ready to gather magic! Go out for a walk. Anywhere, it doesn't matter. Okay, it does kind of matter. You'll get different flavors of wild magic depending on where you walk around. The flavor at a goth night club (which may be where you think you belong, dressed like that) isn't the same as the flavor on a city street, and it's nothing like the flavor on a farm, which is totally unlike that of a rainforest or a nature preserve. Every place's magic is different. But it's all still magic, and for most spells it's not going to make much difference. Also, don't worry about looking for a place where no one else is harvesting. Magic is like air: it'll flow to whereever the magic-pressure is low. You're not going to run out of magic to harvest by because you're surrounded by harvesters any more than you'll run out of air to breathe because you're in a crowd full of people breathing. It's not a scarce resource.
Anyway, as you're walking around, you'll notice bits of glittery wild magic start to accumulate on the outside of your aura. Gradually, they'll build up from dust motes to clumps, and if you keep at it long enough your aura will end up covered in raw magic and to second sight you'll look like a wookie that went to war with a glitter factory and lost. But unless you're really really good, you'll get tired of keeping your aura clenched in before the covering gets anywhere near that thick.
When you're starting to get tired of keeping your aura closed, pull the wild magic off of it. You can use an aura comb for this, too, but I never do. Fresh wild magic comes off easily in your fingers, and unless you have a very expensive professional-quality comb, aura combs will change the flavor of the magic in a subtle and usually not particularly good way. The clumps of magic should come off easily in your hands: just curl your fingers and rake them over all the clusters and loose bits. You need to keep your aura closed while you do this, too, otherwise the magic will start to dissolve in your aura. So don't wait until you're too tired to clench your aura any more! Don't worry if you get tired quickly in the beginning, it gets a lot easier with practice.
Once you've gathered all the wild magic into a big bundle, you can store it by wrapping it up in something shiny. Tinfoil works fine: be sure to wrap it with the reflective side facing in. Or you can buy the bright cellophane bags that packaged magic comes in -- any good Craft store will sell the bags by themselves in boxes of a hundred. Or tie it up with spells you're not using for anything else. Or you can start spinning it right away. Just remember to wrap up any leftover magic so it doesn't dissipate.
Before you start spinning, set aside a good-sized clump of harvested magic, maybe twice the size of your head. If you've tied it up with spells, undo enough of them that you can pull it out easily. Or unwrap one side if it's wrapped or bagged. Now, you'll need to make a vortex with your aura. There are lots of ways to do this, so I'm only going to explain one. And for pity's sake, don't use one of those mechanical-based vortex-generators, if you're going to use those you might as well just buy bulk spells, why bother making your own?
Start by relaxing your aura all the way. Loosen it up. Breathe. Chill. Meditate on your navel. Contemplate the universe. Embrace your surroundings. Whatever works for you. Once your aura is spread out around you, swirl your hand through the aura before your chest, over and over again, in the same direction. Yes, it's just like making a whirlpool in a bathtub. Yes, you can do it widdershins if that makes you happy, but the direction doesn’t matter. Make sure you swirl so that you can reach both the top and the tip of the vortex easily: the top is going to be a little above your wrist/elbow, depending how much of your arm you manage to swirl, and the tip will be below your fingers: bigger swirls make the tip lower down. If you pinwheel your whole arm, which I'm not recommending for beginners, you'll end up with the tip by your shoulder and the top past your hand. This is annoying to work with, though it's easy to make a vortex like that. For thick, sturdy spells, a wide slow vortex is best: for quick nimble ones, you want a narrow fast one.
Once you've got a nice vortex going, feed some of your harvested magic into the top with one hand -- if you're right handed, you’ll probably want to use your left for this. Don’t be too slow about getting it from your hand to the vortex, because if the harvested magic spends too long in contact with your open aura it’ll start to absorb. Once you get the magic to the top of the vortex, it’ll along towards the vortex tip. Put your right hand by the tip and be prepared to catch it between your thumb and forefinger. The vortex will taper it most of the way, but you need to use your fingers to smooth the thread of the spell and make sure it’s of uniform thickness. You can twist it a little extra to keep it nice and tight and make sure it coheres well. Keep feeding in magic until the vortex starts to slow noticeably. Then you’ll want to nip off the spell you’ve been spinning so you can restart the vortex. Or take a break, as you prefer.
And that’s all there is to it! The theory’s pretty easy, the tricky parts aren’t so much doing it as doing it well.
Hmm? What do you do with the spun spell? Well, that’s up to you, isn’t it?
This is a meme of sorts, started by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) haikujaguar. It's a way to make exercise more interesting by imagining it as a metaphor for something extraordinary. haikujaguar uses a metaphor of "minutes exercised: alien bugs killed". minor_architect uses "minutes exercised: people rescued". dulcinbradbury does yoga and her metaphor is "ambassador to an alien race". Mine is "minutes: spells spun". It took me ages to finish this after deciding on the metaphor, so I don't know that I'll be doing as much with it as the other people I know who are doing the meme. :) | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment   |
| terrycloth and I talked jurann into re-activating his CoH account to play with us. While fooling around with a team of three not-very-well-suited-to-grouping-together characters, we talked about making new ones.
The other day, I'd made a comment to Terry about a "rouge" in an Architect (ie, player-created) mission. "It makes me want to make a group where that's intentional. With Rouge and Foundation and Lipstick and stuff for names." So after I suggested "escaped research super-animals", Terry suggested we go with cosmetics-test animals. "They can be named for the cosmetics that were tested on them." Which all of us liked, so we went with that.
After the requisite fiddling with the costume generator, Terry turned up as the Rouge Rat, a rat stalker in eye-searing red paisley ("Where did you get that outfit?" "I made it out of discarded test swabs for makeup"), I came on as Maskara (name stolen from Jurann), a little black bat corrupter using the sonic and pain sets (a rare instance where my character's powers sort of matched her theme), and Jurann as Eye Shadow, a polar bear brute.
Then we rampaged around Mercy Island, killing snakes for Burke. It was fun! Somehow I always like playing better when it's with a set of thematically-matched characters. I should've tried to get Lut to join us, even if he is pretty burned out on CoH. >:)
We made the new characters on Victory ... I don't know if there's an existing LJ SuperGroup they could join, but I'm tempted to create our own to keep the theme going. I'm not sure what to name it, though. Rouge Isles Experimentals? Rouge Isles Lab Animals? Refugees of the Rouge Isles? I dunno. Maybe Jurann and Terry have some ideas. :) | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Thomas Frank, the Wall Street Journal's token liberal opinion columnist, writes about what he describes as modern slavery.
I titled this post "indentured servitude" because that's more what this reminds me of.
Once in America, the workers found themselves at the mercy of the traffickers, who allegedly kept "them as modern-day slaves under threat of deportation," in the words of James Gibbons of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The recruiters apparently took care to keep the workers in debt, charging them fees for uniforms, for transportation, and for rent in overcrowded apartments. Paychecks would frequently show "negative earnings," in the words of the indictment. And if the workers refused to go along with the scheme, the traffickers held the ultimate trump card, the indictment claims: They "threatened to cancel the immigration status" of the workers, rendering them instantly illegal.
I am appalled by the scheme, and saddened at the way our country's immigration laws have made it possible. I have second-hand experience with the crippling sense of helplessness, the sense that you cannot quit, that comes from your employer controlling your immigration status.
But I called this post "indentured servitude", even though this is rather more reprehensible than indentured servitude usually was -- indentured servitude typically ended eventually. Because the primary threats to slaves were usually imprisonment, corporal punishment, and torture. The ultimate threat was death. Deportation is bad, but it's not quite the same as being flogged to death.
That's one thing that struck me: "Once here in America, of course, they can't quit, or else they lose their visa status.".
Was that really the traffickers' ultimate trump card? Were these workers actually willing to put up with menial jobs, negative wages, and overcrowded homes because all of that was still better than going back to where they came from?
A little more research turned up information Mr. Frank didn't mention in his piece: that Giant Labor Solutions threatened $5000 fines against their employees if they returned to their home countries, and also that the visas they used were obtained using false information.
Still, I remain bewildered by Mr. Frank's solution to the problem, which appears to be 'stop offering the visas at all': "What I keep wondering is why we have such a program. Unemployment is over 9% and climbing. Why make it worse?"
I keep wondering why we have such a program, too. But what I keep thinking is that these limited, temporary visa programs make a mockery of the legend on the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
I would like those words to be true. I would like to take this "ultimate trump card" out of the hand of these traffickers by telling these immigrants they are welcome in my country, with or without an employer to go through umpteen legal hoops to obtain a piece of paper to hold over their heads.
I would like for the end of this story for these immigrants to be that they get paid the wages due them and are free to go back to their home countries -- or stay in this one, which they worked so hard to get to.
Instead, I suspect the end to their ordeal will be deportation anyway.
Somehow, that fails to make me feel like my government is doing so much better by the would-be immigrants than the traffickers were. And weren't the immigrants the victims?
Oh, I see. I missed Mr. Frank's point entirely. I wasn't supposed to feel sorry for the people he called 'modern slaves'. I was supposed to feel sorry for the Americans who didn't get the jobs the slaves were doing. The fate of the enslaved is quite irrelevant.
... I always get that part wrong. | | comments: 8 comments or Leave a comment |
| Forecasted nighttime lows for the week: 78-80. Daytime highs: 94-97.
Looks like jogging home after work is not going to be my prefered mode of exercise this week. Guh. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| bard_bloom started writing sythyry several years ago, back in 2002. I started following the journal several months after inception. It is, in many ways, like any other livejournal, with the writer focused mainly on the events of daily life, with occasional digression to explain some of the more unique factors of the journalist's life so that readers can understand better, or to write about some facet of politics or economics or whatnot that's important to the journalist. When readers comment, Sythryry sometimes responds, and sometimes doesn't, just like most journalists.
Of course, there are some atypical facets to Sythyry's LJ. To start with, Sythyry isn't from Earth but from the World Tree, the setting for the eponymous RPG created by beetiger and bard_bloom. Sythyry is a Zi Ri, a race of immortal housecat-sized hermaphrodite dragons and one of the eight Prime species of the World Tree.
The World Tree is an alien place, and not just because it's a world in the shape of a tree, with a fixed sky and a giant lantern for a sun, or because its people are physically different from humans, or because its gods seed the branches with monsters, or because it teems with magic. No, the thing that really makes it alien is that culturally, politically, and socially Sythyry's world is unlike mine. The political structure for Sythyry's home city-state is sort-of-but-not-exactly feudal, with noble titles often earned rather than inherited and much political power exerted by persuasion rather than force. The standard family unit varies from race to race, with some commonly having marital bonds between groups of a dozen or so, some between just two or three, some between just two. Marital bonds hey may be loose and flexible or rigid, depending on the prime species involved. Homosexuality is not merely tolerated, but doesn't even register as noteworthy. Romantic interest in a member of another species, however, is verboten.
While unusual relationships are one facet of this world, the topic is handled with a refreshing lack of prurience. Sythyry doesn't choose to relate the details of anything more salacious than a kiss. bard_bloom's interest is clearly in exploring the customs and culture of this alien landscape, not their physiques.
It's a world neither utopian nor dystopian. Vheshrame, Sythyry's home city-state, is no democracy, nor is it ruled by an evil despot or a monarch of perfect benevolence. The people have customs that are quite appalling to modern American sensibilities, and others that are refreshingly sensible, and still others that seem bizarre and irrational. The World Tree is an enormous place, and it is not a monolithic civilization where every city has the same customs. It escapes many of the sillier tropes of fantasy and sf.
These are all good things that I like about sythyry, but they're not what I love best. No, what I love best is that the protagonists belong to the setting. Sythyry is a product of zir culture.
This seems like an obvious thing, but it's tremendously rare in fiction. It's easy to make a fantasy setting that's just like America, only cooler: substitute horses and crystal balls for cars and telephones -- voila! Making a culture unlike my own is a little harder, but still simple enough: make a dysfunctional nation ruled by a corrupt advisor and his puppet king, or put evil megacorporations in charge of a hapless population, or make a society according to $PERFECTSYSTEM of my choice, where all the natives will be happy and conflict only happens when some foolish individual doesn't realize how perfect $PERFECTSYSTEM is. Making a nuanced world is much harder.
But making protagonists that go with that nuanced world -- now, that's the real test. Protagonists who don't kneejerk rebel against the irrational beliefs of their society? Ones that will argue stubbornly in favor of moral teachings that are quite clearly immoral by modern Western standards? Now that's hard.
And that's what Bard's protagonists do. And not in a simplistic this-is-our-society-we-all-fit-into it way, either. They rebel, sometimes against the wrong things or in the wrong way. They learn, sometimes the wrong lessons and sometimes the right ones. They grow and change, but not overnight. They don't fit in, but they want to fit in. They struggle not only to do the right thing, but to figure out what the right thing is, guided by a moral compass that is one part rational, one part selfish, and several parts cultural and /or racial. Their opinions don't change in the face of a few paragraphs of well-worded argument, but evolve slowly over the course of weeks, months, years.
They are, in a word, real.
And that's what I love most.
On Starting to Read Sythyry
If you want to start reading sythyry (which I highly recommend!), you can start with the current story arc, Sythyry's Vacation, which is convienently arranged in first-to-last order here or starting here on LJ. Or you can start at the begining, Sythyry's Journal, in first-to-last order here, or you can start it from the first entry using the LJ calendar.
Or you can just start in the middle: add sythyry to your friends list now and read whatever the next entry was, or maybe read an entry or two at random from the recent ones, same as you probably do with any other new journal you add to your friends list. That's what I did, back in 2002 or 2003 when I first added Sythyry, and despite being a diary about a fictional person in an alien setting, reading from the middle worked surprisingly well. You might find it helpful to refer to the glossary, dramatis personae, or other topics like food and calendar if you get curious about what some unfamiliar thing refers to, but you can pick a lot up from context as you read, and you can always ask sythyry questions. There's no reason to be intimidated out of reading by the existance of previous entries, or feel compelled to start at the beginning any more than you'd think you had to read anyone else's LJ from the beginning in order to add them. Of course, the whole journal is worth reading! But I actually thought it was more fun to jump into the middle and eventually go back to the begining than starting at the beginning would've been. YMMV. :) | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| I'm testing this new system for opening accounts online for one of our banks. My main contribution to this project has been picking grammatical and typographical nits and locating broken links.
I'm checking the FAQ, which I noticed at least four errors in the last time I looked.
This time I notice that it's using two en dashes instead of em dashes, and one hyphen instead of an em dash.
...
"It's an en dash! 99% of the people in the world do not know the difference between an en dash and an em dash! You have to look it up every time. And style guides differ on how to use them. Just let it go."
"... but later in the same document it uses an em dash correctly. So on one page it's got en dashes, hyphens, and em dashes all serving the exact same purpose."
... I tried to let it go. I really did. But I can't. It has to at least be consistent. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| Terrycloth made a comment about one of my resolutions recently, which reminded me that I'd never posted a resolutions update for April. And hadn't done one for May yet either. So, double-month update this time.
Write:
April
* GM'd an RP session on Sinai for one of brennabat's PCs.
* Played in an RP session on Sinai with kagetsume, minor_architect, tuftears and boingdragon
* Still playing in the X-Men game.
* 10 flash-fiction "word of the indefinite time period" pieces.
* 15 regular entries
* MUCKed once or twice with terrycloth
May
* GM'd a couple of RP sessions on Sinai for one of brennabat's PCs.
* Still playing in the X-Men game.
* 1 flash-fiction "word of the indefinite time period" piece.
* 3 regular entries
May was a serious drop-off month for writing. Possibly because I started playing three different new games that month. Or possibly it’s less that it was a drop-off than that April was a spike. Maybe I’ll review the whole year at the end to look for patterns.
Draw:
No art points at all for April or May. I haven't felt like drawing lately. Closest I've come to drawing is buying another artist's anatomy book.
Play:
Lots of playing!
* Still playing CoH for several hours a week with terrycloth and occasionally with Lut. We started a new set of characters in April, an all-melee team of delinquent angels. They're not actually rebellious, per se, they're just bored from waiting for the Apocalypse and decided to get some practice in by playing in the Architect Entertainment missions. They're not playing hooky! Really, it's important studying. Yeah. In May, we also participated in a few task forces run by the Repeat Offenders group, and did a Rikti mothership raid. I was disappointed by the mothership raid, which didn't have a good "climax" point. I didn't even see the endboss, and the raid continued for a random period of time after the endboss went down, until the game finally kicked us off the ship because enough time had passed for the shields to come back up.
* Puzzle Pirates: I've been doing more group activities -- sea monster hunts and pillages -- especially in April. A new ship-duty puzzle came out as an alternative to sailing: rigging. I like rigging quite a bit and have played a lot of it. Which is a little sad, because I like and am good at sailing too, so it'd be more useful to improve at a game that didn't take sailing's place. But I enjoy just doing the puzzle in Puzzle Pirates a lot, so I don't care that much.
* Left 4 Dead: This was on half-price sale for one weekend in late April, and I picked up a copy. Lut and I played several games together against the computer, but we never got to the point of me doing PvP. I’m not a fan of FPS games but this one is better than most, from my perspective.
* Free Realms: Started playing in May, I think. I've been playing it mostly instead of Puzzle Pirates, owing to group play sucking. But I like the mining/harvesting games, and the three-dimensional world and quests add a certain undefinable something to the experience. Sometimes something annoying, mind, like the endless walk-up-and-down-the-switchbacks for the CCG quest chain at one point. But still ... something. Played some card games in it with Terry, but I've basically decided against investing any money in the card game, and even all the free cards together don't really give enough variety to make it a game I'd play week after week. Still don't know how lone I'll stick with Free Realms.
* Demigod: I started playing this game after Lut had been playing it for a month, on the theory that we could play it together. Which we've done twice so far, if you count both games we tried to play against the computer with terrycloth, where the idle tiemout kicked Terry both times and we quit out. I've actually played it more with Terry, who picked it up at the same time I did. Terry and I haven't had the timeout problem when it's the two of us against the computer or against other players. We've done a total of two PvP games: in the first one we trashed the other team, and in the second one the other team (different players) trashed us. I'm doing single-player games against the computer in an effort to improve at the game, but at some point I'll have to go against human players again. Or quit playing. I don't think the computer is going to offer enough challenge, or enough useful challenge, in the long term. Lut hasn't been playing it lately; he's been playing Battleforge instead, a freemium RTS/cardgame hybrid that, to my eye, looks like it has all the weaknesses of both. O_o Lut likes it, though.
* The RP items under writing also count as play.
Eat:
* Um. I've been eating? I stopped tracking calories because it was too tedious, and I haven't been particularly eating less, or eating healthier, or even eating only things I like. o.o;; Yeah, not scoring well here by any criteria.
Exercise:
April: 19 sessions
May: 18 sessions
So the average has been closer to 4 sessions a week than 5. I've noticed that "normal" weeks, where I don't have any special activities planned during the weekend or on the weeknights, tend to get me 5, but when if I plan to go anywhere, that torpedos my exercise schedule. A four day weekend away from home can result in the weeks bracketing it having only 3 sessions each.
I think I'm just okay with that. Trips are a bit stressful to me, but I'm not going to stop doing them or add to the stress by insisting on exercising while I'm away, or on nights that I have to pack, or whatnot.
Also, on the up side, most sessions have been 30+ minutes instead of the minimum 20. 4x30 equals more than 5 x 20, so it's not all bad news.
Visit:
* In April, I flew to Seattle to visit terrycloth. Did a fair bit of gaming, too. Even won a game of Agricola! And lost a whole bunch of games of Race for the Galaxy to Terry. >:) Which I didn't mind at all. I wish I knew why it is that losing a PvP game of Demigod annoyed me, but losing PvP in the Free Realms CCG or at Race for the Galaxy didn't.
* In May, I went to ConQuest, a local sf con. I also visited with a couple of friends from NY who were in the area for a trip unrelated to me or the con. RoomCon was a blast as always, and I spent a couple of hours hanging out with skyflame.
Live:
* I got a new garage door! Now if I can get a working remote for the garage door opener, I can even scratch an item off my to-do list of things around the house.
* I’ve been doing a lot more yardwork, and hating it rather less, for the last month. Partly this is by dint of counting yardwork as exercise (it’s generally less physically demanding than jogging, but I usually do it for longer, too, and it’s usually more effort than just walking). Mostly it’s because, at Lut’s instigation, I bought a new weedwhacker.
Rowyn: “Do you have any weedwhackers that are battery powered?”
Lowe’s employee: “I don’t think so … oh, this one is. It’s the most expensive model we have and costs three times what the cheapest does.”
Rowyn: “I’ll take it!”
This was a good decision. The thing I hate most about power tools is fussing with either gasoline engines (which make them heavier as well as messier and more annoying in general) or power cords, which inevitably tangle. The battery-powered weedwhacker is a pleasure to use by comparison. The only thing I don’t like about it is that the “on” trigger has to be held down and is mindbogglingly stiff. Even with a teeny bungee cord wrapped around it to keep it most of the way depressed, three days later my hand is still sore whenever I grip anything, because it took so much pressure to keep the trigger depressed.
Lut also bought me a lopper, a clever thing like hedge trimmers except with enormous handles and a small blade. It’s great for cutting off branches and lopping down junk trees, so I’ve been lopping down various little trees that have sprung up too close to the house in the last few years.
I still kinda hate yardwork, though, because I still end up covered in itchy rash spots, no matter how much bug repellent I use, or clothing I wear, or how I take it off, or how quickly I take a shower afterwards. Oy. Hope springs eternal. Maybe I can buy weedkiller that works on poison ivy/oak/sumac. I did tear out some of the poison ivy, but there’s more around and I’m not that good at identifying it. Or pulling out weeds in general.
Anyway, I actually don’t feel horrible about home maintenance lately, even though there’s still a huge scary long list of things-I-haven’t-done waiting for me to get to them.
*checks list*
Well, there’re only 10 items on the huge scary long list now, some of which aren’t that scary. Maybe they’ll get done some day. I should add some other things to the huge scary long list, though.
Love:
<3
Be happy:
D: | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| A few weeks ago, Lut and I took Monday off and stayed home, playing games and dinking around. While perusing my friends list, I came upon bradhicks's review of Free Realms. I'd already seen the Penny Arcade cartoon for it and my curiosity was piqued, so I downloaded it and signed up for an account.
As the name suggests, you can play it for free. It is, as Lut puts it, a "freemium" game. You get access to some of the content for free, and some of the content is available only to subscribers, and some objects have to be purchased individually for a one-time fee if you want to get them at all. It's a hybrid of all other massively-multiplayer-online-game revenue models; the only element missing is paid in-game advertisements.
The hybrid revenue model is oddly appropriate, given the hybrid nature of the game itself. Most, if not all, of the other MMOs around center around one basic game or type of game. For example, EverQuest, Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, World of Warcraft, and City of Heroes are all essentially combat-based leveling games; there may be crafting attached but there's no real gameplay involved in it -- it's "gather the ingredients through combat or by wandering the landscape looking for X, then combine by clicking". PvE and PvP may play differently, but the game engine is the same. You could argue that "wandering the landscape looking for X" is a game separate from the combat engine, but if so, it's not much of a game. Puzzle Pirates arguably offers more variety, with a multitude of different puzzle games and even card games all accessible from the same game world, and the puzzles addressing different needs in the game world. But Puzzle Pirates has clearly picked its core competency as puzzle games: it's implemented parlor games like poker and hearts, but all Puzzle Pirate's original games are basically variations on a theme of "detect patterns in the pieces on a game board and manipulate the pieces on it to match those patterns in the fastest and/or most efficient manner".
Free Realms, on the other hand, contains not only different games, but different styles of games. So far, I've tried its kart racing, demolition derby, puzzle game for mining (and a similar one for gardening), collectible card game, tower defense game, Wario-style mini-games for cooking and smelting, mini-games for footracing and finding things, and a leveling-based combat game. There are other games I haven't tried: chess, checkers, the mail-sorting game, and what bradhicks described as the "perpetual Easter Egg hunt" of adventurers, where you wander the map looking for stuff (Brad Hicks loves this feature, which perhaps goes to show that not everyone agrees with my assessment that wander-the-map-looking-for-X is a lame game). And probably more that I haven't even seen yet. The mechanism for introducing you to the different games-within-the-game is to give you quests, just like WoW or WAR: NPCs with question marks over their heads will give you directions to talk to another NPC or to start one of the sub-games.
I hesitate to call all the sub-games "minigames", because some of them are a lot more mini than others. All of them have a certain relative simplicity to them, from what I've seen. The kart-racing game has a variety of race tracks to do laps on and power-ups that you can fire off selectively along the way; it's fun but it doesn't have the detail you'd expect from a modern full-fledged racing simulator. The combat game felt like a dumbed-down, clunky version of Warhammer or City of Heroes or any of a number of other combat-leveling-games. Click the target, click the attack buttons, try to position yourself not to agro more mobs, hope you don't run out of hit points before whatever you're fighting does.
In fact, the combat game -- which forms the core of nearly every other MMO -- is easily the weakest part of Free Realms. Maybe it's better if you play one of the subscription-only combat classes, but after running through three or four combat instances, I'd had enough and didn't try any more. It didn't help that leveling in the brawler class was painfully slow, particularly compared to leveling in most of the other classes.
But combat aside, the other sub-games have been reasonably entertaining. The biggest downside is that of all the subgames, only two are designed for groups: the kart games and the combat. The combat isn't fun. The kart games are fun, but when I tried them they weren't fully implemented yet so you couldn't level up in them (that was a couple of weeks ago; I guess it might've been patched in by now, but it seems unlikely). The only other player interactive sub-game is the trading card game: you can't play it in teams, but you can play it one-on-one against other players.
One thing that appeals to me about Free Realms is that the variety of different games makes it feel more like a "world" to me than a typical MMO. The sprawling virtual landscapes typical of MMOs don't do much to make the place feel real when there's basically only one thing you can do: kill mobs and take their loot. I don't know that I'll stick with it. It doesn't have the variety of puzzle games that Puzzle Pirates has, and while most of the non-puzzle games are entertaining for a little while, they don't have staying power for me. Finally, the lack of interesting group content really hurts it for my purposes: I use games as my primary form of socialization, and Free Realms manages to be, in some ways, even less social than Puzzle Pirates. As one example: the TCG is its own platform basically 'outside' the shell of the game. Your character will show as connected to Fre Realms when you're playing it, and they can send /whispers to you ... but you won't receive them, not even after you leave the card game.
I might yet get sucked in to buying cards for the trading card game anyway, though. Every Free Realms account gets a starter deck, and you can get more cards by either (a) buying them for real money or (b) winning them in card duels against quest NPCs. I went through the entire quest chain and beat all but two of the optional NPC decks, and have a total of, I don't know, maybe 140 cards. As any player of a CCG knows, 140 cards is not enough. There may or may not be non-card quests that also give out cards as rewards, but it looks like the natural way to get more cards from here is to ... eep ... buy them. I probably don't actually want to do that. Still, I've played several rounds of the TCG against terrycloth, and enjoyed it even though he's crushed me something like 7:1. I often get frustrated if I lose a lot, but for some reason it hasn't bothered me with this. Possibly because the game is quick to play, around 10 minutes per game, so there's always "the next game" to look forward to. Still, it's a collectible card game, and those have been quite expensive for me to play in the past.
Oh, one other noteworthy aspect:
The game is really cute. Really cute. Sugary-sweet, go-brush-your-teeth-when-you're-done-playing, cute. The target market isn't me or current MMO players, but children. Brad Hicks noted in his review that it's got robust parental controls, and a number of touches in the game even apart from the super-friendly narration of the tutorials indicate that it's designed to appeal to young kids. So if you hate cute things, you will hate this game. On the other hand, if you’re a parent looking for a game you could share with your kids, this might be a good choice. | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| I was doing an architect mission* in City of Heroes with terrycloth last night, and it made fun of Richard Simmons**. It always bothers me a little when people make fun of Richard Simmons, because he's the only exercise guru that -- it seems to me -- really cared about helping people be healthier.
Sure, he's weird. I'm weird. I'm not gonna judge. All I know is that when I was growing up in the 80s, the TV was full of attractive young exercise gurus in perfect shape doing exercise shows surrounded by attractive young people, none of whom ever broke a sweat or missed a move.
Then there was Richard Simmons, with his frizzy 80s hair and a show full of ordinary, overweight people, all doing their best, all being encouraged by this kind, friendly, enthusiastic man. He always seemed to be having a good time.
Simmons defied the traditional belief, that exercise shows were about selling people a fantasy of what they could become, showing people with perfect physiques and claiming "with just ten minutes a day you'll look just like this!" Instead, he showed real people, with an accompanying subtext of: "You can do this, and it will make you healthier."
The message I got from Richard Simmons was this: "You don't have to be embarrassed to exercise. You don't have to feel ashamed because you don't have a perfect physique. Exercise is for everyone, not just the young and thin and beautiful. Whoever you are, whatever shape you are in, you can do something to make yourself fitter and healthier, and that something, even if it's just walking around the block, is worth doing."
Maybe there are other celebrity exercise gurus like that now and I just don't notice it because I'm not paying attention any more.
But it's a good message. It's a good message for life, not just exercise. I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for him because of that.
* "Architect missions" are user-created.
** I should note that this particular case of satire didn't strike me as mean-spirited or cruel, the way some jabs at Simmons do. It just happened to make me think about this. | | comments: 12 comments or Leave a comment |
| A creature ten feet tall at the shoulder, with four limber legs set close together on a short torso and a nose as long and prehensile as a tentacle, strode through the forest with a young woman cradled securely in the curve of its proboscis. She sat as if in a swing, one hand resting high on the nose and close to where it joined the beast's head, the other low and near the far end. The woman's gaze swept across the forest canopy above, searching for something. "There, Freyr." She pointed up and to the left, where colorful fabric draped and splayed over numerous branches and multiple trees, like an enormous handkerchief dropped by God. The woman patted the animal's left cheek. "That way. Up, pumpkin."
The beast emitted a muted honk from the end of its nose, eyes focusing on the colorful spray of cloth. Its paws gripped one of the thicker tree trunks with sharp-clawed toes, and it climbed with its long nose dangling to one side and the woman still seated in its crook. She leaned forward to peer between the branches and leaves, looking up at the enormous expanse of tangled cloth.
Then her eyes dropped down, and she gasped. "Freyr! There!"
Ropes hung from the canopy of cloth like the threads of a spiderweb. But no spider spun at the end of the ropes, only a man dangling limply.
"We'd better get him down."
*
He woke to the face of an angel.
She was a brown-skinned wingless angel with a crooked nose, a wide face, short tangled hair, and strange beasts for servants, but she was no less an angel for all that. She'd saved his life; as far as he was concerned that made her more than qualified. "I've asked your name before, haven't I?" His tongue felt thick and his words slurred.
She nodded. "Twice." She had a tray with a couple of capped bottles and a big mug of warm soup in her hands.
"Sorry. Never was good with names."
"Also, you keep fainting." She set the tray down next to his bed.
"Terrible manners. Must apologize." He tried to sit up, and to his surprise succeeded. The room around him was strange: walls, ceiling and floors all of smooth polished wood, with a few pieces of sturdy wooden furniture and wood carvings for decorations. Someone really liked wood. And brown. All different shades of brown, from pale beige to deep mahogany, created by stains and inlaid in various intricate patterns in the furniture. It was pretty in its way. He glimpsed himself in a big mirror opposite the bed. He was not pretty in any way. The skin of his face, upper chest, hands and wrists, was red and puffy from burst blood vessels.
She sat beside him and smiled. Her smile was as crooked as her nose. "You already did."
"So I did. Sorry about that. Oh wait, apologizing again."
"I forgive you. Do you want to try drinking some soup?"
"Sure. Will you tell me your name again?"
"I am Illyana." She tipped the cup to his lips. He drank; it was warm and bland and he was grateful for it, too.
"Mmm. I'm Richard Paulson. No surname?"
She shook her head. "Don't need one."
*
Richard spent many days convalescing in Illyana's bedroom. Despite the presence of his angel, he was not in Heaven. He was still in Western Altheia, which Illyana called home. It turned out this wasn't the trackless wilderness he'd been led to believe.
Well, it was sort of a trackless wilderness. Illyana's people had seceded from the galactic community. He and Illyana spoke often as he recovered. She had fascinating stories to tell, about the local wildlife and her life there. She lived alone, with her nearest neighbor almost a kilometer away. He couldn't imagine a lifestyle so isolated, so empty of people and the entertainments he was used to. It sounded like it should be boring, but Illyana never sounded bored. She had a way of talking that could make even ordinary things seem interesting, and nothing she talked about was ordinary.
"So what do you people do, really? This is some sort of high-tech agrarian community?"
"Not agrarian," Illyana explained patiently. "Agrarian people farm. We don't farm. We like the forest here and do not want to cultivate it or transform it. Our goal is to live without a disproportionate impact on our environment." Her own home was artfully designed to resemble a thick-trunked tree from without.
"... right. So you're, what, hunter-gatherers?"
"We don't hunt, either. We do gather, but we're not primitives. We have computers, robots, microfusion power plants, medicines and so forth."
"How can you maintain all that without an industrial base?"
"The robots do a lot of the maintenance and we do the rest."
"But you've got no economies of scale! And your communications ... you've got no ansibles?"
"We've got short-wave radios."
"What's that?"
Illyana explained.
"And no vehicles?"
"No roads. We don't want to have a disproportionate impact on our environment. We use the goriphants for transportation."
"What about graviders? They don't need roads."
"What's a gravider?"
Richard explained.
"Those do sound nice," Illyana admitted. "Except for the part where it throws you out when you're several kilometers above the ground."
"It does have certain drawbacks." He leaned back against the pillows and shook his head. "Still. You've no idea how to get to Inverse Spaceport?"
"There's a spaceport? Where's Inverse?"
"It's on Quarter Continent. Northeast of here, across the Midnight ocean. About sixty-five hundred kilometers from here. I think."
She shook her head. "My people left the galactic mainstream sixty years ago. We haven't had word of what's going on outside this forest since then."
"You're kidding. No one ever tries to leave?"
"We like it here. It's comfortable and beautiful and we have everything we need."
"But ... no one?"
Illyana gave a little shrug. "Not so far."
"So I'm stuck here."
She reached out with one brown hand and smiled her crooked smile. "It's a good life we have here, Richard. Would it be so bad to try it?"
He looked at the hand of his angel as it covered his, and thought about the strange beasts she rode, the vast expanse of wilderness surrounding them, the stories she told. He thought about his family, and his friends, and his work, and the life he'd had. He'd lost that, maybe. But he hadn't lost everything. Richard smiled back at her, feeling suddenly giddy. "No. I suppose it wouldn't be."
proboscis: a nose, especially a prominent one like the trunk of an elephant. Also, the long tubular feeding organ on some invertebrates, such as butterflies and mosquitos. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| Because apparently I think I haven't had enough to post about lately, I did an art meme. My answers are for drawing/painting, because they'd be quite different for writing.
1. What do YOU think of your art as a whole?
It's okay. I'm not particularly good at drawing or painting, but I'm good enough to get the general look I have in mind across, which is sometimes handy. Some of my art I enjoy looking at. Often I'm disappointed by one aspect or another of what I've created; at least as often, I am blind to its faults.
2. What do you think others think of it?
Pretty much the same as above, except that I think I like my favorite pieces more than anyone else does.
3. How would you describe your inking methods?
Appalling. I don't love inking nearly enough to get any good at it.
4. What body type/anatomy do you draw the most, and why?
Women and furries. Out of habit, mostly. I like how women look, and I have a ready model for a woman at hand, so I have more practice with that than anything else. Twenty years ago I was infected with a delusion that furry art was a good way to make money, and I like drawing furries and animals too, so I wound up with some practice at that as well. When I doodle, I doodle what I'm good at: thus, women and furries. Oh, and on whitespace and alone, because backgrounds and groups are hard.
5. How has your muse changed over the years?
The classic pinup -- single figure with no background -- kinda bores me now. My muse wants to do compositions. I have no skill at composing. So mostly I (a) do pinups I'm kinda bored with or (b) do compositions that I don't think are very good or (c) don't do art at all. It'd probably be more accurate to say "my muse mostly wants to tell stories, and my consciousness has decided that drawing is not an effective way for me to tell stories."
6. What inspires you most, currently?
Drawing for someone else. I like it when someone else will enjoy what I've made.
7. What do you think you should work on to improve your art?
Study composition and anatomy, and use references.
8. Have you received any kind of negativity towards your art? If so, what?
Not to speak of. I'm sure someone somewhere has said bad things about it when I could hear, but not enough to make an impression on me.
9. If you work for commission or sell your art, what is the most you've ever made on one piece?
Selling art doesn't make economic sense for me, as a rule: at a price where I'd be adequately compensated for the time it takes me to draw a picture, it'd make more sense for the buyer to hire someone with more talent. So the few times I've done commissions or sold art, it was mostly for friends and because I wanted to do the picture anyway. The most I've been paid was $100, for an 18x24" commission done in pastels. I like working large.
10. What big art projects and/or ideas do you have going right now?
Um. None. What creativity I have is directed at writing lately. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| "It's $29.95 a night," the man at the registration desk told her. She fished around in her pockets for her wallet. It wasn't in her jeans. She couldn't remember where she normally kept it; every place felt a little wrong. Maybe she used to carry a purse? A pocket on the inside of her jacket held a bumpy disk on a velvet ribbon. She pulled it out to look at it in bemusement: it was a cameo, white on a black background, set on a worn red choker. The clerk gave a low whistle. "Is that real?"
No, it's an illusion, she didn't say, pulling her billfold from an outer pocket of her jacket. "Real what?"
"Victorian cameo. That looks like an antique."
"I don't know." At the clerk's look, she added, "I got this jacket from a thrift store. I just found this in the pocket," because that was easier than telling the truth.
"Oh. Probably not, then. But you might get it checked out sometime anyway, those're valuable." The clerk frowned as she pulled bills from the wallet. "You're paying with cash?"
"Is that a problem?"
"Well ... there's a $250 room deposit, too. You'll get that back when you check out, if there's nothing wrong with the room."
She shrugged and gave him $280. "Good night."
As she walked away with the key card in one hand, she held up the choker, studying the carved profile with its high-piled curls and soft chin line. It didn't go with the black leather motorcycle jacket at all.
*
A bell tinkled as she stepped inside an antique shop in Columbus. The shop smelled faintly of lemon-scented cleaner. It was cluttered, but every surface was dust free, even the rows of tchochkes and the old books on shelves against one wall. A fortyish man with long hair brushed behind his ears and a trim beard stepped out from a door behind the counter, moving carefully to avoid disturbing any of the crowded oddments. "May I help you?"
"Maybe. Can you tell me if this is valuable or not?" The short woman walked to the counter, holding out the choker. "I don't think I want to sell it. I'm just curious."
"Let's see ... mm." He took a jeweler's loupe from a drawer and sat down beside the counter to look at it. She didn't realize he wasn't fully human until a tentacle snuck out from beneath his hair to adjust the loupe. She must have made a noise, because he looked up. "Sorry. I'm not a monster, honest. It's just ... you ever win something and then realize you didn't actually want it?"
She shook her head. "No. I once lost something I didn't actually want, though. I think I understand."
He smiled, and peered at the cameo again. "Ribbon's too worn to be worth anything. Cameo's pretty. It's not gemstone ... sardonyx conch, I think. Nice carving, hand-done. You don't have documentation on it, I suppose?"
"Documentation?"
"A certificate of authenticity, or a history of it, or even a letter or diary that might mention where it came from."
"Why would that matter?"
The proprietor gave her another smile, his brown eyes kind. "It's the provenance of an antique that makes it valuable, ma'am. How old it is, who owned it, who made it -- all the parts of its history. I can tell by looking that this was hand-carved, and hand-carved shell is very rare now, so it's probably over seventy-eighty years old. It's worth something for that, maybe a hundred. But it might be a lot more if I knew where it came from. If you like, I can take it off the ribbon, see if there's a maker's mark on the back. That'd tell me more, might be able to Google up something on it."
She looked at him for a moment, then held out her hand. "No, that's okay. I don't want to sell it, and I don't need to know where it came from. Thank you."
"As you like." He handed it back to her. As she left the shop, she fastened the choker around her neck.
Provenance: Place of origin; derivation. the history of the ownership of an object, especially when documented or authenticated.
Bard gave me this word, too. For some reason I seem to have an easier time coming up with stories on words he gives me than if I go looking for a word on my own. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| On Friday morning, as I walked to work after calling Animal Control, I went over in my head reasons for why it was OK for me to let the baby opposums die. Animals die all the time and I don't do anything about it. I'm not a vegetarian: I eat dead animals, and I don't fret over the crappy quality of life they have before being slaughtered, either. I keep cats and I wouldn't shed a tear if they caught mice. I can't take care of baby opposums even if I did rescue them from animal control and the elements. Who is going to invest the time and energy necessary to keep a bunch of tiny animals alive? Surely the Wildlife Center didn't call me back because don't have anyone who can take them. Opposums are not an endangered species. Nobody cares about them. What difference does it make?
And it doesn't make a difference, does it? The world is not going to be a better place for having a few more baby opposums in it, and it's not going to be a worse one without them. No one's life is going to be improved. Well, no one's except for the babies', anyway, and they don't count, do they?
And I actually believe that, except that I don't.
No don't let them! Save the baby possums!
elvenlaughter left that in a comment. And ... that's how I felt
It didn't really matter that I couldn't think of a single sensible practical reason why I should try to save the baby possums, or that I could think of a half-dozen reasons saving them wouldn't work anyway, or that there are much simpler tasks that I need to do that I can't get my act together to do. I wanted to save the baby possums.
So I made that third call to the wildlife center, for Elvenlaughter and that little kid inside me saying no don't let them! For the storyteller in me that wrote the first entry thinking what am I writing? "I found a dead opossum with babies still in her pouch, and I called animal control and they picked them up and killed them." What kind of a crappy story is that? Because every reason not to felt like just a rationalization of why it was too much trouble.
Because the inability to articulate one side of an argument doesn't mean that side is wrong.
I still feel guilty for going to work Friday morning instead of doing something then, and getting them to the rehabbers sooner. I still can't explain why it mattered to me. But I don't need to. It was the right thing to do. Sometimes it's enough just to know that.
Also, they were insanely cute.
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Palm Possum
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( More baby possum pics behind cut )
Also, one note -- I keep saying "I saved them", which is technically true -- I was the one who gathered them up, brought them inside, cleaned them, etc. But Lut did a whole bunch of stuff for me while I was dealing with the possumlings. He moved the cat stuff from the foyer to the kitchen so the possumlings could have the foyer, fed my cats, went to the store for possum-stuff, drove me and the possums to the rehab center, and so on. The rescue operation was a joint effort. And of course, not nearly as much effort for us as for the rehabber who ended up with them will have to put in. | | comments: 14 comments or Leave a comment |
| It was an interesting night.
Lut suggested I set an alarm for a couple of hours after I went to bed, so that I could turn the heating pad back on. The heating pad has an automatic shut-off as a safety feature. In this case, it was an unsafety feature, but I couldn't disable it and it had been the only model WalMart had in stock.
I have a peculiar quirk: I don't have a great time sense but I have a reliable internal alarm clock. The only time I oversleep is when I wake up, decide I don't want to get up after all, and go back to sleep. Even that is a very rare event for me. So I didn't set an actual alarm clock, but I told myself as I was going to sleep at about 1:30AM: "Remember, you want to wake up in two hours to turn the heating pad back on for the baby possums."
I woke up with Ash sitting next to my face and mewling at me. I petted her sleepily, and thought, I need to be awake for something. It's not petting the cat. Why do I need to be awake? It took about a minute for oh, baby possums to surface. I got up. It was 3:30AM. I went out to the foyer, turned the heating pad back on, refreshed the sponge with more warm water, woke some hapless baby possums to make sure they weren't dead, and lay down to go back to sleep. Then got up again to make sure that the door to the foyer was closed again (it was) and both cats were on my side of it and not the possum side of it (they were).
Fifteen minutes later, Lut woke, went to the bathroom, and asked me "Do you want to reheat the possums?"
"Already did."
I went back to sleep.
4:30AM: Woke again, got up, turned on the heating pad, skipped waking the possums this time, went back to sleep.
5:30AM: Woke from a dream about baby possums. Turned on heating pad, woke possums (still alive), changed out sponge, turned off light in foyer. Started to lay back down, turned around, and switched light in foyer back on because the heating pad socket is on the same circuit as the light.
6:15AM: Went to check on possums. Carefully closed door to foyer. Spotted Callie in foyer with me. "Ack! How did you get in here? Get out! No you can't eat any baby possums!" Shooed Callie out. Checked on possums, who'd grown a few inches and were happy and excited to see me and started jumping on me and crawling all over me. "Aww, you're even cuter than before, you look kinda like kittens ... wait, I'm dreaming again, aren't I?" Woke up. Waited 15 minutes, reset heating pad (some of the "turned on heating pad" were really "turned it off and turned it back on again to reset the auto shutoff timer", because it doesn't shut off for an hour or so and sometimes I checked it before it had shut off), only woke a couple of possums to make sure they were still alive. Lay down again. Got up to make sure door was still closed (it was) and cats were on the right side of it (they were). 10 minutes later, Lut called out, "Do you want to reheat the possums?" "Already did."
7:15AM: Woke up, reset heating pad , turned around to lie down again, stopped, checked door (closed) and cats (with me).
8:10AM: Woke up. Stayed awake this time. Changed sponge, reset heating pad, got dressed. Woke all the possums to make sure they were still alive. They were! All twelve of them! Yes! They made their little cat-sneeze "chh! chh!" noises at me, and I made "chh" noises back at them. Took some photos of the possums with my real camera as opposed to the crappy cellphone camera. D'aww, so cute. I'll post more pictures later.
Lut got up shortly thereafter, and we set out a little before 9 for the nature center. We went over the bits of care rendered to the possums and that they hadn't really eaten or drank yet, and the woman at the center took them into the back area to extract them from my tub into one of their containers. I asked her to take a picture of them in their new environment for me, which she did (posted below). They won't be staying at the center: the center has home rehabilitators, and one of them will come pick the babies up. Hopefully today.
So, they were all alive and seemed reasonably healthy the last time I saw them. Maybe with luck they'll make it after all. I am tired now, and I put more effort into doing this than I think was necessary -- it was a warm night and I fully expect the possums would've been fine without the heating pad at all -- after all, they'd survived Thursday night outside without any source of heat. Nonetheless, I'm glad I did it anyway, for a bunch of reasons. Yay possums!
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Bucket o' Possums
Baby possums ensconced in a bucket at the Lakeside Nature Center |
| | comments: 15 comments or Leave a comment |
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Baby Possums
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At 3PM, I decided to try calling the wildlife sanctuary one more time. This time, they were open and a woman answered the phone.
"If you can get the opossums to us ... " she said, after I explained
"I don't have a car. How late are you open?"
"Until 5." Lut doesn't even get home until 5. "We're open from 9 to 5 tomorrow."
"Okay ... um ... I guess I'll put the babies in a box and take them in tomorrow morning?" If they live that long. If they're still alive now, and no dog ate them and Animal Control didn't come early and kill them when they took the mother's corpse.
I hadn't taken lunch yet, so I skipped it and ran home at 4:50. Literally ran: I'd planned to jog home anyway, although I skipped the extra mile or two of jogging I'd normally do. When I got home, I saw that a couple of the babies had started roaming away from the mother; one was a couple of feet away. They're little things, mouse-sized and looking a lot like mice with large heads and thick hairless tails. I stepped past them to get the key from the garage, and dashed into the house to get a box and gloves and whatnot. While I was grabbing stuff from the house, Lut managed to get home and not run the roaming baby over or anything. He was wondering why the garage door was open and was going to look for a box himself when I came out with a big plastic tub.
I started scooping up baby possums and putting them in the tub. I don't know how many baby possums I was expecting. I'd seen a couple of tails last night, so I was thinking ... maybe three or four? There were a couple roaming loose. And then more tucked against their mother's corpse. And then more underneath her. And more still inside her pouch.
Prying baby possums out of their dead mother's pouch is not as hideous as I thought it would be, but still not fun.
When I was done, I had twelve baby possums in a big plastic tub.
We did some quick research online. When I decided to do this, I was thinking "OK, I'll just put them in a box with a towel and some water in the basement and whoever survives can go to the wildlife shelter tomorrow, if any of them do".
This project suffered from serious scope creep.
I took them inside, took them to the basement, and decided that it was too cold in the basement for them. What little research I'd done said to keep them warm, surround them in soft cloth, and don't use terrycloth because their teeny claws can get hooked in the cloth loops and cause injury. So I got some old clothes that don't fit and I don't like out of the basement, and then Lut got more old clothes and another tub because I decide to clean them off (they were covered in foul yellowish goop which was, at a guess, varying parts urine, feces, and decaying corpse) and express them (another one of the recommended first-aid steps with orphaned baby possums; they need manual stimulation to eliminate. This, too, was less awful than it sounds but still not on my top ten list of Fun Activities). So I would take a dirty possum from the first tubful, clean it, express it, and put it in the tub of clean possums. When I first started gathering them up and moving them, they were all very anxious and squirmy and active. They made little chuffing noises that sounded like a cat sneezing. As time passed they quieted down, getting less worried. I hope. As opposed to, say, slowing down in activity because they were dying.
While I cleaned possums, Lut trundled off to the store to get an eletrolyte solution to try to feed them and a converter socket for the light in the extension to turn it into a power outlet so I could plug a heating pad in. By the time he got back, I'd discovered the heating/massage pad we had wasn't working for heat. So I went back to the store to buy a heating pad. I tried to feed them the electrolyte solution but none of them seemed interested in licking or suckling.
At the moment, they're wrapped up and warm. I left a moist sponge with them, as a compromise between "don't try to feed them because they'll get aspirate" and "they'll die of dehydration". One of the sites recommended a sponge to simulate the moist warmth of the pouch anyway. They're sleeping now, except for when I go out to make sure they're still alive and warm, at which point some of them chuff at me, and the rest try to get some rest and all of them wish I'd stop bugging them. The heating pad has an automatic shut-off, so I keep having to turn it back on.
They're really quite cute. Cuteness is definitely a survival trait.
I hope they make it another eight hours until I can get them to the wildlife sanctuary. | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| When Lut got home last night, he gave me a call at work to warn me. "There's a possum in front of the garage door. I think it's just playing dead, because I can see it breathing. But you should be careful if it's still there when you get home, in case it's sick or rabid."
It was still there when I got home. I could see movement in its upper abdomen, too, which I took for breathing until I saw two tiny squirming tails attached to little squirming rears. Baby possums! Now I wasn't sure if she was breathing or if the movement I saw was just them.
Lut had been doing research, and determined, among other things, that (a) possums can play possum for hours, (b) they very rarely contract rabies, and (c) they're marsupials, so they have a pouch. Hence, the babies I'd seen had gotten there via her pouch
So we were optimistic that she might be feigning death. Nonetheless, Lut dug up a wildlife sanctuary and I gave them a call, and left a message.
This morning, I still hadn't heard from the wildlife sanctuary. The possum was still in the same place, with babies now squirming inside her pouch and not otherwise visible from without.
I called animal control and left another message at the wildlife sanctuary. As Trask suspected, animal control is just going to dispose of the dead momma possum and her still-living babies. Poor baby possums. ;_; | | comments: 12 comments or Leave a comment |
| The cockroach general paced across a spotless kitchen floor. Even in the dim green glow of the nightlight, it gleamed. His nervous troops shuffled on the uncomfortably clean floor. Supplies were low, and the terrain barren and hostile. Troop morale was worse. This army was his vision, his dream. It was up to him to hold it together.
He stopped at front and center of the rows of twitching insects and barked out, "ATTEN-SHUN! ANTENNAE-FRONT!"
The ranks straightened out and pointed their antennae forwards.
"Roaches! We have come upon hard times. These are our brightest hours, when we are faced with a foe so terrible, so tidy, it makes a roach's haemolymph flow cold.
"But we shall not give in to despair! Even though large parts of the House, including many ancient and famous heaps of Refuse have fallen before the broom and mop of the Bride, even though mounds of Dirty Laundry are now menaced by the tide of Tide and the fragrant apparatus of the laundry machine, we shall not falter. We shall infest the kitchen, we shall infest behind the stove and the countertop. We shall infest with growing numbers and growing stench in the air, we shall contaminate this house, whatever the cost may be. We shall infest the cupboards and the pantry, we shall infest the carpet, we shall infest under the lineoleum, we shall infest the basement and the attic, we shall infest the bathroom -- " his chittering rose to a fevered squeak as he reached the anaphoric crescendo of his speech, " -- we shall never surrender!"
A switch flicked on, and brilliant light flooded the kitchen. A woman shrieked. Roaches scattered to the safety of darkness underneath the refrigerator, dishwasher, and stove.
"I don't care how you feel about pesticides, Jim! We are hiring an exterminator!" the woman screeched.
Beneath the refrigerator, the general huddled with his troops. "... we might, however, make the occasional strategic withdrawal."
anaphora (noun): The deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several successive verses, clauses, or paragraphs. Source: The Free Dictionary.
Bard menaced me with this word on Tuesday. Ironically, Tuesday’s story employed the concept of anaphora but didn’t contain the actual word. "Anaphoric" is the adjective form – "pertaining to anaphora". | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| He was flying eight thousand meters above the wilderness of Western Altheia when his gravider showed the first sign of trouble. The warning came when he stopped riding in the cockpit at a lazy 0.25 Gs and his head slammed against the neckrest at 3.8 Gs. Oh, this can't be good. He took in the readings from the head's up display his goggles provided, and spun the internal grav dial.
The internal grav dial was not supposed to spin.
Definitely not good. Internal gravity did not change for a couple of seconds, than halved. Altitude was dropping at over 200 m/s. Internal grav must be working to some degree, or I'd be plastered to the ceiling already. He pulled the straps of the seat harness into place and buckled them across his chest, which took a second he didn't really have. Altitude was now dropping at 400 m/s. The klaxons clamored and shrieked at him from all directions. He spun the external grav dial, which also was not supposed to spin. The velocity of the fall stabilized for a half second, then slowed to 300 m/s, then increased to 500 m/s. This is not freefall. Freefall would be slower. He tried the steering handles. Left-right worked fine. Forward-backwards was not affecting speed. Up-down had no obvious correlation between what he was doing and the orientation of the craft. Which was now at an altitude of 5000 meters and falling. Great. Would I like to crash in the forest to my left, or the forest to my right? Or maybe ... the forest ahead of me? There was a lake he could aim for, in fact, and he did, but he didn't expect it to make a difference at his present speed.
The gravider's built-in ansible communicator was useless on this part of the world, with no relay station within five thousand kilometers of him. He slapped the mayday broadcast beacon, but there was no way anyone was going to respond to it before he hit.
All his gear was in the gravider. Camping equipment, signal flares, food, solar cells, rifle, clothes, GPS, everything. The beacon was in the gravider's black box and would probably survive the impact. If the internal grav compensators didn't fail completely, he would survive the impact.
Internal gravity suddenly spun to -3 Gs, and his chest slammed against the restraining harness.
If internal grav failed, he would be a messy red smear on the inside of the cockpit.
The beacon would summon help to the gravider. If he ejected now, he'd be kilometers from it and lost in the wilderness with no equipment.
Internal grav hit -6. He tried not to pass out. Well, do you want to die now, or wait until later for starvation and exposure to get you?
Oh ... let's go with later. He punched the eject button.
The seat burst out of the cockpit. The wind hammered against his face as the gravider plummeted forward and down, while he started to slow to terminal velocity. A computerize voice from the earpiece of his goggles spoke: "Calculating time to safe deployment of parachute .... calculating .... warning: safe deployment not possible. Calculating optimal deployment time. Deploying in five point three seconds. Five ... four ... "
The gravider was moving much too fast. So was he, though friction was slowing him down. Not slowing him down fast enough. The ground looked far away, but that wasn't going to last.
"Three ... two ... one."
The harness jerked taut across his chest and around his limbs, striking him like the attack of an angry kraken. Something, probably the laws of physics, slammed his head forward while all the blood drained to the front of his body. A thick red haze filled his vision and blocked out the HUD. On the other hand, maybe today's a good day to die, he thought, and then darkness overwhelmed him.
klaxon: a loud horn or alarm.
I never knew before that "klaxon" was the standard spelling and "claxon" the variant. | | comments: 14 comments or Leave a comment |
| Couple of links to WSJ pieces on the Amazon sales-rankings & search snafu:
Amazon’s official statement.
LJ user claims responsibility. Amusingly, I found “Weev’s” community posting (which I must admit looks pretty unconvincing, and the WSJ blogger isn’t particularly convinced by it either) not via WSJ, but via links on LJ. But the general theory (elaborated further here) that it was the result of some party or parties (maybe Weev, who knows?) gaming the user-rating system does seem plausible, since a few people had noticed books getting delisted for no particular reason back in February but it didn’t become a widespread phenomenon until Easter weekend. More plausible than, say, that Amazon intentionally delisted all GLBT titles over a holiday weekend as a policy decision and then backpedaled on it, anyway. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| It was a dreary gray building full of dreary gray people. They stood in various lines, their expressions revealing how long they'd been waiting: the longest had lost all will to live, while newcomers held out hope.
Ken still held out hope. He looked over the eight forms on the black table and the six forms on the brown one, and picked forms 603a.1 and 402b.89 from the black table. He went to the line with a sign reading "Driver's Licenses" next to it, and waited.
Time passed.
The women at the front of one line burst into tears while the man wearing wire-rimmed glasses behind the counter looked on without pity. Her plea for mercy went unanswered; at length, she left.
Time passed.
Ken reached the head of the line. "I'd like to renew my license, please."
The man behind the counter didn't look up from his computer. "You're in the wrong line."
"But the sign said -- "
"This line is for new driver's licenses. You need to wait in the line marked 'Registration'."
"But I don't want to register -- "
"To renew your license, you need to go to registration."
Ken opened his mouth to voice another protest. The man in the wire-rimmed glasses turned his head and gave Ken a look. Ken realized then the futility of it: this was the petty tyrant's bailwick, and no outside power could appeal to it. He bowed his head meekly and moved to the line for registration.
Time passed.
A man screamed and beat his head against one of the countertops. "I just want the tags for my car! That's all I want! I'll pay you anything! Is this too much to ask?"
At the head of the registration desk, a woman with a pageboy haircut told Ken, "You'll need form 603a.1 and 402b.88."
Ken produced his forms. She barely glanced at them. "That's form 402b.89."
"But I -- "
"Form 402b.88 is on the end of the brown table. Next!"
Ken shuffled back to the brown table and filled out 402b.88. He looked thoughtfully at the other forms, then picked up one of each and got back in line.
Time passed.
When he reached the front of Registration again, the man in wire-rimmed glasses was staffing it. Ken gave him forms 603a.1 and 402b.88. The man scrutinized them with eyes full of suscipion. "You live in the Belmont school district. You'll need to complete form 602b.2."
"You mean this one?" Ken whipped it out and lay it on the countertop.
The man recoiled, his lips peeling back from his gums. "... and form 93b."
"Right here." Ken beamed and lay it on the counter.
"Form 305c."
"Got it."
The man in wire-rimmed glasses snatched the papers from the counter and flicked through them. All around them, the room full of gray-faced people watched, holding their collective breath.
The man in wire-rimmed glasses dropped the forms to the counter with a heavy sigh. "Very well." He punched a few buttons on his computer, and passed the renewed driver's license to Ken.
"Thank you." Ken took up the laminated card and held it high above his head. The crowd burst into wild applause, and the sound of cheering followed him as he exited the building with his prize.
bailiwick n. 1. A person's specific area of interest, skill, or authority. 2. The office or district of a bailiff. Source: The Free Dictionary. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| So, yesterday, I combed through the help files for our banking software, looking for information on the changes made to a report in the latest version. After several hours of RTFM, and locating some wonderfully detailed information on the report that did not include the recent changes, I logged a call to their support saying "I can't find this information in the help files. Would you please let me know X, Y and Z?"
Today, I spent four and a half hours in a meeting. Four. And a half. HOURS.
When I got out, I saw I had email regarding my support call. I checked it. The response?
"RTFM."*
So that's been my day. How was yours?
* No, the support response said nothing about where to find it, or give any indication that the person who wrote it had taken any action to verify that the information she was claiming was there was, in fact, there. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Mistletoe was expecting the sumptuous mansion with its twenty foot tall perimeter walls. She was expecting the tower outposts, the uniformed guards armed with automatic rifles. She was prepared for the Rottweilers, the security patrols, the cameras, the alarm system.
But she wasn't ready for the toddler.
How can you have a family? She watched through the scope of her sniper rifle as the target picked up his young son and whirled him around.
She should have been prepared for him. It was all in the dossier: "devoted father", "loving husband". She'd studied it all in detail. She'd paid enough for it; she couldn't afford to miss anything. But reading it wasn't the same as seeing it.
The target set the boy on his shoulder. The tow-headed child laughed and hugged his father's head as his sister ran up and tackled her father's legs.
How can you have a family when you took mine away from me?
It had been twenty years since she had seen him in person. She had not forgotten his face: the crooked nose, the dimpled cheeks, the warm, incongruous smile as he put a bullet through her mother's head. He had looked so happy as her father charged him wielding a kitchen chair as a weapon. He shot him six times before he fell. Her adolescent brother tried to run and he shot him in the back. Her older sister whimpered while she was hidden in a cabinet; he heard her and shot her through the door. All the while smiling and smiling, as he sprayed bullets into the bodies of her family, as blood splattered across the white lace curtains bordering the windows, as he turned their clean bright kitchen into an abattoir.
Now he put his son down on the patio of his own clean bright home. His children tugged at his hands, pulling him towards the swimming pool. A few feet away, his wife smiled at him, calling out something Mistletoe was too far away to hear.
How can you smile at him? Don't you know what he's done?
She had been hiding behind the water heater in the pantry, peering out between boxes and the crack of the door. She heard one of his men yell, "Anyone seen the last girl?" They searched for her for several minutes, while her father's last breaths bubbled out of him and his fingers twitched just a few yards away.
Then he said, "Screw it. She's, what, four? She's harmless. Torch the place and let's get out of here."
Now he put inflatable armbands around his little boy's arms and pumped up a plastic seahorse for his daughter.
Mistletoe didn't have time for this. The cameras for this spot were playing spliced loops of routine footage, but the next patrol would be by in minutes when the guards whose bodies were cooling beside her didn't check in. She double-checked the gauges for wind and distance, braced the sniper rifle, and aimed a little up and to the right of her enemy's head.
Beside him, his daughter danced with anticipation as his arms worked the pump. Mistletoe had a sudden vision of the girl, twenty years later, holding her own sniper rifle to slake a thirst for vengeance. His family will always remember this day, too.
Her resolve wavered.
Her aim didn't. Screw it. They're better off without you, you bastard. Mistletoe pulled the trigger.
As she fled the scene, the deaths of her family no longer haunted her. Nor did the image of her enemy, the back of his head shattered and fallen face-first into the pool, a red stain diffusing through the water.
But she could still hear the young girl screaming, long after she'd driven away.
abattoir: slaughterhouse
This word probably gets a fair amount of use in horror stories, but even though I'm familiar with it I've never used it much myself. It's such a gruesomely evocative word. | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| This is weird.
Something screwy is going on with Amazon's sales rankings. And their search engine. Soemthing really screwy with their search engine: I tried a search for Heather Has Two Mommies, and on my first search the eponymous book came back as the 10th result. Books unrelated to it and matching none of the words in the title, plus imitations of it and ones about it, all ranked higher. Buh?
But when I searched again, I got it as the top hit. Buh?
It also has no sales rank. Contrast this with, say, Schlock Mercenary: the Teraport Wars, which has a sales rank of #637,692, or Alysha's Fall, rank #4,559,584. I'm pretty sure it's not that Heather Has Two Mommies hasn't sold enough copies to get a sales rank.
According to Publishers Weekly, Amazon is saying this is a glitch, and not a new policy.
According to Mark Probst , Amazon Support sent him an email that it was an intentional change to delist "adult" material. (And on what planet is Heather Has Two Mommies "adult" material? O_O Daddy's Roommate likewise lost its sales rank). Probst has a link to a Playboy Centerfold special that kept its ranking, but what roaming about I did trying to find heterosexual adult erotica also came up with a bunch of no-sales-rank results. So if it's a glitch, it's a glitch targeted at pretty much anything GLBT and most (but not all) erotica.
My guess is that it was intentional, but either it was intentionally done by someone who didn't really have the authority to do it, and/or Amazon didn't expect a backlash and is now so embarrassed that they're trying to squirm out of it. :6 The "Publisher's Weekly" piece at least suggests that the rankings are going to come back. It's still annoying at best. Sheesh!
Edit: Bunch more links and info here. Also biased towards "it;s an Amazon plot" but has links on Amazon defending itself. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| A small blue motorcycle pulled into the gas station just after dawn. The rider, a short plump woman neither young nor old, dismounted and took off her helmet. She hung it off the handlebar by the chin guard and reached for the pump. The scrolling LCD display beside it read, Please swipe credit or debit card. To pay with cash, see attendant inside. The woman stopped and went into the little convenience store attached.
The little brass bell tied to the door tinkled as she entered, and a bleary-eyed attendant looked up from his coffee. “Out for an early morning ride, huh?”
The woman smiled at him. “I’d like a gallon of gas, please. And a newspaper.” She pointed to the stack still tied with string next to him. He cut the string off and handed one to her.
“Where’re you headed?” he asked as he rang up the purchases.
“Mmm.” She pulled out a wallet, fat with bills but with card slots curiously empty: no credit cards, no pictures, not even a driver’s license. Not the attendant’s problem: she wasn’t buying beer. She handed over a five and leafed through the paper, looking at the help-wanted ads. “What’s the next town east on Highway 50? Winston?”
“No, Winston’s north of here. East is Renwood. Well, Kersville is east, technically. If you count a bunch of farms and a wilderness preserve as a town, which I don’t. Renwood’s twenty miles off but they’ve got, y’know. Shops and stuff.
The woman smiled again. “I know. Renwood sounds nice.” She folded the paper beneath one arm and headed for the door.
“Have a nice ride. Oh, if you’re going up 50, there’s a monster in the preserve, so you know. She’s harmless, though.”
“Monster?”
“Uh huh.” He gestured with one hand high over his head. “Right by the road, rooted by remorse. Hasn’t hurt anyone in decades. Worst thing she’ll do is mope at you and ask you a question if you stop. Figured I’d warn you so’s you wouldn’t freak when you saw her.”
“She asks a question?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry, it’s not a riddle. She asks ‘What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?’ Doesn’t matter what you answer, she always says, ‘What I’ve done is worse.’ And then she goes back to moping.”
“Oh. Thanks for the tip.” She waved and went back to her bike.
*
Riding took more concentration than driving a car. The motorcycle had fat knobbly hybrid tires designed for both street and cross-country use, and they didn’t work quite perfectly for either. The bike had a tendency to drift down the slope of the road’s camber if the rider didn’t pay attention. So the woman was staying alert anyway, and the monster was hard to miss.
She was rooted by the side of the road, a crow-headed woman twelve feet high with legs like tree trunks, bark-covered. Molting black wings were thick with shedding grey down at her back. One eye, grey and listless as a lump of ash, tracked the rider’s approach.
The woman slowed as she neared the monster. When she was closer, she could see that the woman wasn’t actually growing out of the ground; rather, brambles and tendrils of wood were growing out of the earth to cover taloned feet and humanoid legs. She rode past slowly. She was the only one on the road, and nothing in else was sight but miles of thick vegetation on untended lands. A hundred yards later, she turned the bike around and came back, stopping a dozen feet away. She took off her helmet. “Good morning.”
The monster had her profile to her, watching with one eye. “No.”
The woman looked up at the clear sky, sunlight streaming down the highway and streaking the road with the long shadows of trees. “It’s morning, anyway. Seems like a good one to me.”
The monster didn’t respond. The woman put the kickstand of her bike down and swung one leg over to lean sideways against the seat. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” the monster asked.
“I don’t know.”
The grey eye blinked slowly. “You don’t know?”
The woman shrugged. “The first thing I remember happened last night. I don’t remember anything from before that. I haven’t done anything very bad since then, so I figure the worst thing I’ve ever done was probably before that.” When the monster didn’t say anything else, the woman asked, “What’s the best thing you could ever do?”
The crow-head turned away from her, one eye to the wilderness and one to the road. The beak clacked. “I never thought about that. It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t be enough to make up for what I’ve done.”
“Is standing here enough?”
“No.”
“Then maybe you should think about it.”
The monster didn’t respond. After a few minutes, the woman put her helmet back on. “Hope you have a good morning, ma’am.” She snapped the visor down, turned the bike around, and rode into the rising sun.
This one has a bunch of meanings, most of which come from the same basic idea
cam·ber: noun: 1. A slightly arched surface verb: 2. To arch or cause to arch slightly. Source: www.thefreedictionary.com
Modern roads are cambered to help with drainage. | | comments: 15 comments or Leave a comment |
| You ever start to ask a question, and over the course of asking realize that you've either figured out the answer, or figured out that you should've tried something else before you asked? And then trying something else fixes your problem?
...
It's probably just as well that I prefer writing out my questions so I can send them out, rather than calling people. It saves me a lot of embarrassment when I can just not send it after I have my "doh!" moment. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| The rocking of the ocean's waves was barely perceptible in the forward cabin of the Good Try, where the captain and navigator studied a periplus of the Vandorian coast and compared it to the chart of their current position. "There." the captain pointed to a line two-thirds of the way down the long, painstakingly annotated scroll. "We'll make port at Jango."
"Jango?" The navigator gaped at his captain. "'ave ye gone daft, Cap'n Wymar? D'ye not remember what 'appened the last time we ported at Jango?"
Wymar tapped his fingers against his lips. "Jango ... Jango ... no, it's not ringing a bell."
"Jango! The mess what started at the pub. Wit' the general's daughter? And the two seamstresses?"
The captain cocked his head to one side. "Could you be a tad more specific?"
"Ye were all playin' that game wit' the bottles and the scissors, and then the general an' his men stopped by fer a drink? The whole army ended up chasin' after ye in the dead of the night!"
"Ohhhhhhh. Oh! oh." Wymar frowned. "That was Jango?"
"Yes!"
Wymar clapped a hand across the navigator's back. "Buck up, Arnie. That was years ago."
"It were 16 months!"
The captain waved a hand in dismissal. "A bygone era. I'm sure they've forgotten by now."
"Ye burnt down 'alf their city in yer escape!"
"No! No. Not half. A quarter, maybe. Anyway, it was an accident. No one can prove I did it, and no doubt they've rebuilt since. Look, we need to resupply and the crew's restless because we only stayed in port two days at Innstere. It'll be fine." Wymar waggled a finger at the navigator to forestall further objections. "We'll be out of rum in three days' time if we don't port at Jango. Do you want to be here when that happens?"
Arnie ducked his head and pulled his cap down over his eyes. "No. No sir."
Four days later, the Good Try was berthed at the north end of the Jango port. Arnie was at the navigator's table again, when the door flew open. Arnie hunched forward over the table as a wild-eyed sailor looked in. "Mr. Arnold! Where's the first mate? The captain's been captured!"
"'as 'e now? Mr. Linton's at the helm, I believes. Ye go tell 'im, see what 'e wants ta do."
The sailor blinked and nodded, heading out. Arnie sat back and poured the small heap of coins he'd been hunched over from the tabletop and into his purse. A few minutes later, barked orders from without carried through the cabin door. "Everyone back on board! Shore leave's cancelled! We're leaving 'fore they decide to hold anyone else here responsible for our former captain's actions!" The door opened. "Mr. Arnold! How soon can you have a course prepared?"
"Gots one all ready here." He gestured to the chart before him. "Figured as we might 'ave ta leave in a hurry, Mr. Linton. I means ... Cap'n Linton?"
The new captain grunted. "Good man!" He exited.
Arnie shook his head. "Told ye not ta port 'ere, Cap'n Wymar," he muttered to himself. He gave a thoughtful look to the periplus unrolled beside him, then took out his pen to jot down two new annotations beside the entry for Jango: one symbol for strong rule of law and another for pays high bounties for criminals.
Periplus: an ancient navigation term for a document listing in order the ports and coastal landmarks, with approximate distances between, and other annotations added by navigators. Source: Wikipedia.
Bard threatened me with this word this morning, so if it shows up in sythyry at some point, that's because I took it from him, not because he got it from me. | | comments: 6 comments or Leave a comment |
| They sat at a round stone table incongruously planted in a green meadow, six figures illuminated by the red light of an incarnadine moon. Two of them were mortal, a stout fair-skinned woman of thirty years, and a nervous man with deep brown skin and hair just starting to grey.
The other four were monsters: a ram-headed man with furry legs and a hairy chest left bare by the cloak of feathers draping down his back; a crow with the face of a woman that perched on the table's edge with two taloned feet and used a third to lift her cards; a giant winged snake that pushed its cards to the edge of the table with its tail tip and ducked its head down when it wanted to see what they were; a sphinx with snakes instead of hair: they whispered not-quite-intelligible advice in sibilant voices.
Five of them were playing poker; the sphinx was dealing. In the middle of the table four cards were face up: the king of hearts, the five of spades, the ten of hearts, and two of clubs. The nervous man put down his cards and pushed them away. "Fold."
The crow had already folded; now the winged snake did. The ram-headed man brayed out a laugh. The stout woman spoke in a calm voice. "Call."
The sphinx dealt the river: the ace of hearts. The ram-headed man smiled and thumped his fist against the stone table in triumph. He turned his head to fix the woman with the stare of one brown eye, and stated his wager. "All my knowledge 'gainst all of yours."
The woman lifted her cards by the edge, peeked at them. She looked at the stakes already on the table, pretty glittering things that looked like coins but weren't. She set her cards flush against the table again. "Fold."
The ram-face grinned hugely as he raked in the pot. A confused look stole across the woman's face. Before the dealer could muck the cards, she glanced at her hand and the board one last time. Then she let the sphinx take them from her. "I -- I'm sorry, I forget. What had I wagered so far?"
"All your memories!" The ram laughed again, cruelly. "All of them!"
"I ... I see." She got up from the table.
"You do not have to leave," the woman with the crow body told her. "You have much left that you could wager." The sphinx's hair hissed advice at her: to go, to stay, to consider -- what? She couldn't quite tell.
"No. No, that's all right. I think I'm done. Thank you." She turned to the other mortal before she left. "I don't suppose I told you my name?"
He shook his head. "No ... sorry."
"You could win it back." The ram spun a glittering not-coin between his human-like fingers. "Or try to."
She looked at the coin, and at his face, then shook her head again. "No. I have to go now."
As she walked away across grass tinted red by the unnatural light, she looked down at her empty hands. A curious lightness spread through her. It was an unsettling thing, not to know her own name, or anything at all about the person she was. The person she had been.
But she did not want to get it back. She had seen her hole cards after she lost: the queen and the eight of hearts.
Whoever she had been, she trusted that she'd had a good reason to conduce this ending.
conduce: to lead to or contribute to a particular result. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| "Dr. Treveran! Stop!" The man burst into the laboratory, slamming the swinging door into a metal-sided cabinet adjacent to it with a resounding clash of metal on metal.
The middle-aged woman tapping away at a computer console in a booth overlooking the laboratory tilted her head down to peer over the frame of her glasses at him. "Why, Dr. Vitomsky. Whatever's the matter?" The automated equipment and servos operating on the main floor below did not pause in their paths, or otherwise acknowledge the newcomer.
"Your plan! It's insane! You'll destroy us all!" He charged up the steps to her booth. "You can't create a miniature black hole under these conditions. Your containment field doesn't have a tenth of the power it needs!
"I assure you, my containment field has plenty of power, Dr. Vitomsky. The whole point of this process is to generate power, you know."
"But you can't possibly pull enough power to contain it at the start! You must abort this process!" He banged on the door to the booth. "Let me in!"
"Nonsense. The models were quite pellucid on this subject."
"Models! A computer simulation can't possibly account for all the variables in reality, plus I've checked your math and it doesn't work. Now, Let me in or I swear I'll break down this door!" He turned his shoulder towards the door.
"It's not locked, Dr. Vitomsky."
"Oh." He opened the door and stalked to her computer.
"But you mustn't interfere with my experiment. That could have disastrous consequences; this is a very delicate stage."
"More disastrous than sucking the Earth into a black hole? When were you going to turn your generator on?" He squinted at the screen she was looking at, then minimized the application that was running to look at her desktop.
She checked her watch. "It's been going for 15 mintues now."
"And it hasn't produced your black hole yet? Thank God I'm not too late!"
"No, it made one 8 minutes ago." She maximized the application again and pointed to a graph being updated in real time. "See, this red line shows the exponential increase of power demanded by the containment system. And this green one shows the power output from harnessing the energy of the contained black hole."
Dr. Vitomsky stared at the graph. "You're sure you don't have those backwards?"
"If I did, we'd all have been sucked into the growing black hole by now." She smiled. "Actually, it would have evaporated first; that's what the failsafes are for. There's still some risk it might evaporate, but it's looking stable."
"Oh." Dr. Vitomsky straightened and cleared his throat. "Never mind, then. Good work, doctor."
"Thank you. We're having a party to celebrate tonight if it doesn't evaporate. Did you want to come?"
" ... sure. That would be lovely."
pellucid: Clear, easily understandable. Also: transparent or translucent.
This is a word I already knew, but it’s one I don’t use much so I figured, why not? | | comments: 13 comments or Leave a comment |
| I blame bard_bloom.
Actually, several factors are at fault. Lately, I’ve been feeling like my writing is very bland and uninteresting. I don’t think that my boring and limited word choice is the main reason my writing strikes me as uninspired, and colorful metaphors would probably spice it up better than big words. Still, learning the meaning of “crepuscular” (are you sure that’s not a disfiguring disease?) did remind me that my vocabulary, especially the list of words that I use on a regular basis, has shrunk more than it’s grown in the last decade. So I was glancing over a word-of-the-day archive in an effort to redress this.
From there my chain of thought went like this:
Wow, some of these words are so obscure that they don’t even sound like real words. I couldn’t use these in narrative without sounding stilted.
Most of those samples of “using this word in a sentence” aren’t very interesting. “Use this in a story” would be more entertaining.
Remember how haikujaguar started all the The Aphorisims of Kherishdar stories with the definition of a word from Kherishdar? Wouldn’t it be funny to do that with English?
And then Bard encouraged me. So it’s his fault, really.
“Walter, you can’t name your new cat Acedia.” Michelle rolled her eyes as she pulled the car into the driveway.
“Why not? It’s a pretty word.” Walter got out of the passenger seat and walked around to the back to wait for Michelle to pop the trunk.
“Do you even know what that word means?” Michelle opened the trunk and fished out the new litter box and bag of litter while Walter retrieved a bag full of canned cat food, gerbil bedding, and food pellets.
“As a matter of fact, I do. But I don’t see what difference that makes. It’s not like anyone else will know. It sounds like a flower or something. Azalea, Aster, Acedia.” Walter shifted the bag to one hand to unlock the house door.
“Hah. Why don’t you just name her Azalea, then?”
“Because I like Acedia better. Besides, you haven’t met her yet.”
“Whatever. You’re the one crazy enough to get a cat when you’ve already got gerbils. I’m sure that will work out great, too.”
“Acedia doesn’t have any problem with the gerbils.” Walter held the door open for Michelle, and she stepped inside.
“It’s not Acedia I’d be worried about. Where do you want this?”
“In the bathroom. Acedia’s probably on the living room sofa. I’m gonna check on the gerbils.” Walter went upstairs to the bedroom.
Michelle put the kitty litter in the bathroom and peeked into the living room. A large, fluffy tortoiseshell cat sprawled across the center cushion of the couch. “Aww, who’s a pretty kitty?” The cat regarded Michelle with great equanimity as the woman approached. When Michelle extended a hand to her, the cat regarded her fingers with similar equanimity. “You are! Yes you are!” The pretty kitty deigned to lift her head a fraction of an inch in order to sniff Michelle’s fingertips. The animal did not object when Michelle sat down next to her and started petting her.
Walter came into the room carrying a round ball of clear plastic with airholes and a securely-fastened lid. A gerbil sniffed at Walter’s fingers from the inside. “Here, watch this.”
“Walter! You can’t mean to – that’s just cruel!” Michelle protested as Walter set the ball on the floor. The gerbil ran forwards, sending the ball rolling towards the coffee table. “The cat’ll give it a heartattack!”
Walter snickered. “Robespierre’ll be fine. Watch.”
From her perch on the sofa, the cat watched the gerbil ball bump into a table leg before rolling underneath the coffee table. It bumped into the couch, rolled along the side, then tumbled away as Robespierre gamboled inside.
Acedia yawned hugely, and laid her head down on the sofa cushion with eyes half-lidded. Gerbil and gerbil ball roamed cheerily around the living room floor.
Michelle glanced between the two animals. “Okay. Maybe Acedia’s a good name for her after all.”
acedia: apathy; boredom. Originally used to indicate the mortal sin of sloth. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| I learned a new word this weekend: crepuscular. Like diurnal or nocturnal, it indicates the times that an animal is active. But instead of day or night, it means "active during the twilight hours (dusk and dawn)". Apparently a lot of animals that are commonly regarded as nocturnal are actually crepuscular.
Which is an interesting tidbit, but not what I was thinking when I learned the word. What I was thinking is: "what a horrible word." It looks like a combination of "creep" and "pus". It sounds like an insult, or maybe a disfiguring disease. "His skin was crepuscular, boils looking ready to burst". "Unhand me, you crepuscular lech!" Yes, I know it's from Latin just like nocturnal and diurnal, but ewww. It sounds nasty. What were they thinking? | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| The good news: I did a lot more in March than my fake update listed. The bad news: I'm not nearly as happy about it. Life is like that, alas. Though doing the fake post did provide some perspective. However little I thought I was doing, I could've done a lot less.
Write:
* 7 entries to my LJ in March, mostly short ones.
* Five of them were writing exercises.
* One RP session with Brenna, and one in Mirari.
* Still in the X-Men PBEM.
* Joined moonwolf's Ichabod Hate university / Heaven Sent University RP forum, themed as "rival colleges for supervillains and superheroes, respectively", which has been fun. It reminds me of unscheduled MUCK roleplay in slow-motion, and has several features I like, such as: 1) I can poke my nose into scenes when I want to 2) Conversely, it doesn't hinder anyone if I don't show up so I can wander off without feeling guilty 3) I can make multiple characters so if my current one doesn't fit a scene I can make another one (I've only made one so far, but I'm sure I'll make more eventually) 4) it's slow enough that I don't get lost trying to keep up.
* Joined bard_bloom's Game of Worlds, which is a Google Group for shared world-building. Also a low-stress creative thingie.
* The last couple of weeks, I've tried to set aside 8AM-8:30AM during the week as "fiction writing time", with moderate success. This morning I used it to start this entry instead, and a few mornings I've either used it to write on one of the above-mentioned forums, or skipped it to play Puzzle Pirates. But since starting the habit, I've written (checks), um, 5200 words on one story. Which is more than I thought I'd done. A largish chunk of that was written the weekend before last, however, when I wasn't doing any roleplay, so it's not all due to the dedicated time. And it's a new story, which always goes faster. I haven't posted any of the new story anywhere. I don't feel very good about my writing these days. I should probably do more writing exercises.
Draw:
The majority of the participants on the supervillian forum are artists, and there's a bunch of character sketches posted. I doodled up a picture of my character in Artrage 2, which remains a surprisingly nice way to do sketches. I'm not too crazy about doing color work in it. Oddly this, is because it feels too digital when compared with Corel's PhotoPaint. PhotoPaint really does have a wonderful selection of brush types, and I like the way its tools feel. So far, Artrage's brushes don't feel as much like real media, even though that's Artrage's main focus.
I've played around a little more in Artrage with other sketches, too.
Apart from that, I finished three plates and two tiles at All Fired Up while I was visiting John. And drew a new picture. So, I don't know, let's say six art points for March.
Play:
Once again, another stellar month for goofing off. Lots of boardgaming in Florida, and lots of Puzzle Pirates and City of Heroes at home.
Eat:
More of this than really necessary, especially during the Florida trip. I've been sloppier about tracking it, too.
Exercise:
This was a bad month for exercise, due to the trip to Florida. Exercise is always the first thing to go when there's a disruption to my routine. Even so, managed 14 times out of the month, which is about 2/3rds of my goal. Missed 8 sessions, 6 of which were due to the trip. So feeling okay about that.
Visit:
Spent a week in Florida, which was wonderful. This was ostensibly for a week-long work conference, which took up:
3 hours Monday
3 hours Tuesday
8 hours Wednesday
8 hours Thursday
5 hours Friday
I headed down the Friday before the conference and came back the Sunday afterwards. The whole thing felt a lot like a most-expenses-paid vacation. I was going to post the highlights from the vacation perspective here, but I'm gonna move them to their own post instead because otherwise it's be the whole post.
Live:
Ummm.
I did some yardwork. Still useless.
Be happy:
Not doing great on this count, either, but I've been more happy than not this month, and the overall trend seems positive. I really should get in the habit of paying attention to this daily, as it's hard to gauge in retrospect. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| Write:
I wrote these words yesterday! All five of them! Well, the first four. Anyway, woohoo! Lots of writing!
Draw:
I drew a couple of lines during a teleconference at work. And you know what? The second one came out straighter than the first! Massive art improvement in just one month!
Play:
Hardly have time for anything else!
Eat:
Every day! Several times on almost all of them!
Exercise:
I walked ALL THE WAY from my computer to the bathroom -- and BACK again! -- at least ONCE every day! Woohoo! I'm gonna be thin as a rail in no time!
Visit:
I see my cats every time I get home! Can't get more company than that.
Live:
I'm posting this, aren't I? Still alive! Totally escaped getting hit by cars, dying in a nuclear holocaust, being lynched by an angry mob, electrocuting myself in the bathtub, or any of the other things that might have resulted in failing this resolution. I'm SO AWESOME!
Be happy:
I accomplished all my New Year's Resolutions! Of course I'm happy! I'm the most productive useful person EVER! Yaaaaaaay!
You know, I almost wish this was my real resolution update for March. | | comments: 7 comments or Leave a comment |
| I wasn't going to say anything about the AIG bonuses. Really, I wasn't, because I think the whole furor is silly, making a huge issue over a tiny symptom.
Then I read this.
Short version:
It is not possible, under current US tax law, for an employee to return income to his employer and have that money not counted as part of the employee's income.
So, those who got bonuses have the following options:
(A) return the full bonus to AIG, in which case they will owe taxes on the full amount of the bonus anyway.
(B) donate the full bonus to charity, in which case the alternative minimum tax means they probably still have to pay taxes on all or most of it.
(C) keep the bonus and use it to pay state and federal taxes which -- if Congress passes the House's version of the punish-AIG-bill -- will probably exceed 100% of the bonus amount.
Y'know, I am not without sympathy for those who are angry that AIG's financial division employees still had a job and got fat "retention" bonuses (even if they'd quit) regardless of their performance at their job.
But the government response here leaves me truly infuriated. These employees didn't do anything but accept what they were offered for legal employment, and this after-the-fact "no, actually, give us back that $1,000,000 bonus or we'll throw you to the mob, plus you have to pay us an additional $280,000 or we'll jail you for tax evasion" is just nauseating. No one who hasn't been convicted of a crime should be subject to fines of 130% of income.
What a mess. | | comments: 20 comments or Leave a comment |
| the_gneech gave me a writing prompt Tuesday too, but I didn't get to it then. Here it is now!
*
At the bottom of the mineshaft, slaves toiled with picks and shovels, their faces grey with dirt and dust, prematurely aged by hard labor. They were clothed in tattered rags that failed to cover the scars of brutal beatings so many had endured. The air was bad, and made worse by the smoke of lanterns that poorly lit the cold stone walls.
A radiant figure of translucent gold stepped through the walls and into the scene. Although the newcomer seemed to glow with his own light, his radiance did not illuminate the shaft, and the slaves showed no signs of seeing him as he moved between them. He tried to touch one on the cheek, but his fingers passed through the slave. He moved further down one of the narrow passages, stepping through a slave as if one of them weren't there. Gold feet glided just above rock as he entered a larger space. It was still too cramped for the work the slave ringing it were doing. They had to swing their picks with care to avoid the support beams at the center that held up the low roof. One of the beams already bore the scar of a previous accident, and it groaned from time to time as if it were as unhappy with its lot as the slaves.
Besides one concave wall, an adolescent boy grimly swung a pickaxe too large for his skinny arms. Each blow was an effort that threatened to wrench the tool from his hand, but somehow he maintained control. The boy did not notice the translucent man as the gold figure stopped behind him, nor did the pickaxe hesitate as its swing passed through the newcomer.
A second golden figure appeared beside the first. "Matthias. You shouldn't come here." Her voice was as clear and radiant as her form, but it held a hint of sorrow.
"I know, Rialla. I can't help it. They toil and suffer so much, and for what end? To the greater glory of a monstrous Overlord." The gold man held his hand out to hover over the boy's scarred and bony back.
"This nightmare is no longer your nightmare, my friend." Rialla put her hand on Matthias's shoulder, and her touch was solid. "You cannot reach them because their mortal world is no more substantial than a dream. Wake with me, and return to Paradise."
He shrugged off her hand. "It's easy for you to say! You passed on a thousand years ago! Your son isn't still trapped in there! How can I enjoy Paradise, knowing how he suffers? When will it be his turn to 'wake'?"
Rialla turned at a noise by the entrance. "Peace, Matthias. His turn may be at hand."
A squat, sour-looking overseer in brown leathers advanced down the shaft. He cuffed one slave as he passed, snarling. "Useless lazy worms! Get to work! Faster! His Lordship needs that alithium today, and you had better find it!" He cracked the end of a long whip against the back of one slave. "Now! Or you'll taste my lash again!"
The struck man staggered, gasping, and Matthias's son took a hand from his pick to reach out and check the other's fall.
"Look to your work, cur, not him!" the overseer barked. The whip lashed out again. Matthias cried out, trying to stand between the overseer and his son. The whip flicked through him, catching the boy across his cheek. The youngster turned, too fast, trying to get his hand back on the pickaxe and bring it around to resume his work as instructed. But his grip was poor and his aim worse. As he pulled the pickaxe back, momentum dragged it higher and it collided with the support beam. Too distracted to realize what had happened, the boy hauled the pickaxe forward despite the obstacle. The beam groaned and snapped against the pressure. Above them, stone rumbled and creaked.
"You idiot! What have you done?" The overseer cracked the whip again at the boy, and he and the other slave nearby cringed back from the beam they'd been trying to prop back into place. Other slaves screamed and tried to run.
But it was too late. The weight of a hundred feet of earth and stone shuddered down on top of them as the tunnel collapsed. The lights of the lanterns winked out, crushed and suffocated. Only Rialla and Matthias remained, golden figures hovering in the earth where the tunnel had been.
One by one, other golden forms rose around them, blinking and confused. One cried out. "Papa! Papa, how are you here? What's happened?"
Matthias held out his arms to embrace the now-golden, now-tangible form of his son. "The best thing that could have, my son." He took his hand. "Come. It is time to see your true home."
*
The prompt was "write a story where the happy ending is 'everybody dies'."
If you want it in rhyming couplets, though, Gneech, you're gonna have to ask level_head | | comments: 4 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I've been meaning to post about this and but somehow I haven't yet. Work is sending me to a conference in Florida next week! I'm heading down Friday (3/6) and leaving the folloging Sunday (3/15), and staying with koogrr on the weekends. I'll be busy during the day through the weekdays, but weekday evenings I'll be free too. The first Saturday I know we'll be gaming with jordangreywolf, but the rest of the time is pretty open. If you want to see me while I'm down there, drop me a line at my LJ email address (rowyn@ , etc). <3 (I'll have my sidekick with me, so I'll get any emails sent to me at LJ even while I'm in Florida.) | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| beetiger gave me a great writing assignment! ‘Describe an ordinary human activity, like eating breakfast, to an alien.’ <3 So I’m doing it first.
*
"Hello!" Iklchix said to me as I stepped out of my bedroom. The tiny alien was inside his encounter suit, which looked like a creation of spun yellow glass, hovering under the power of three pairs of thin rapidly beating wings and overlaid with a harness of black straps.
“Good morning, Iklchix.”
“That’s Iklchix.”
“Sorry.”
“What are you going to do now, Rowyn?”
“Eat breakfast.”
“What’s that?”
“The first meal of the day.”
“What’s a meal?”
This could take a while. “Food?” I went into the kitchen and opened the freezer.
“Ah, sustenance! I must replenish my nutrient bath periodically because the nutrients of Earth’s atmosphere are inappropriate for my species. But this is your homeworld; surely the nutrients in its atmosphere are suitable for you?”
“Um. Suitable, but not sufficient." I debated trying to explain that humans don't consider oxygen a nutrient, and decided it was too early in the morning for that. "I have to eat additional nutrients or I run out of energy.” I opened a box of Toaster Scrambles and slid two onto a plate.
“Eat?” Iklchix hovered over the plate. A green analytical beam washed over it from one of the encounter suit’s translucent tentacle-arms.
“Consume?” I put the plate into the microwave and set it to nuke for 25 seconds.
“You consume frozen solids?”
“Sometimes. I’m going to heat this up first, though. It’s only frozen to preserve it.”
“How do you consume frozen solids?”
“I put them in my mouth and then swallow them. The same way I consume all food, actually.”
“You put it in your mouth? But you use your mouth for talking!”
“Not while I’m eating, I don’t. Anyway, it doesn’t stay in my mouth; that’s the swallowing part.” I took the plate out of the microwave and carried it to the toaster oven.
“You put all of that inside your body? Doesn’t that hurt?” A red analytical beam from a different tentacle arm studied my toaster scrambles before I slid them into the toaster oven and pushed the lever down.
“Um. No? I chew it up first, and my stomach’s designed to digest it. Well, evolved to digest it.”
A burst of staticky noise came from Iklchix. “Warning! Warning! Rowyn, are you aware that the outer covering of mostly plant matter conceals innards composed of bits of flesh and dead embryos?”
“Yes. That’s what I eat. Usually not described like that.”
“And you are going to put this concoction, which has been killed, burned, frozen, subjected to microwaves, and burned again, inside of your own body? Willingly? Using the same mouth that you use to talk?”
“Yes.”
“Humans are so gross.”
howard_tayler gave mean difficult exercises, including “write two blurbs”. Blurbs are made of pure evil. But being evil and difficult probably means that trying to do them is good for me, so I tried anyway.
Blurb to agent: Jack may not be a prince, warrior, or mage, but the Goi will learn not to underestimate the powers of an acrobat, piper, and storyteller.
Back-cover blurb: Izi knows her brother would not willingly disappear without word. But she’ll learn that Jack’s more than a storyteller, and maybe he can help ….
PURE EVIL, I tell you.
Those blurbs are for my Nanonovel, which isn't technically my most recent project, but it's the one I've been thinking about the most lately.
howard_tayler's other exercise, ‘write a fight scene between characters who don’t know how to fight’, isn’t nearly as evil, although it came with a bunch of qualifiers that mean I probably failed it anyway. v.v
Callie crouched low to the floor, taking cover in the lee of the loveseat as she watched and waited for her target. Her tail lashed from side to side, and her haunches twitched with the desire for action. Ash, the focus of her concentration, sat just a yard away, underneath an end table and in front of the heater vent. Callie concentrated hard, waiting for the slightest movement.
The heater came back on. Ash’s fur stirred in the gust of warm air.
Callie leaped! She fell short of her prey, the end table cutting off her arc of descent. Ash turned her head in Callie’s general direction as Callie lurched awkwardly the last several inches and bapped a paw against Ash’s face. Ash tilted her head away from the blow, looking annoyed.
Undeterred by her opponent’s retaliatory look, Callie wrapped a foreleg around Ash’s neck and tried to get her into a headlock. Callie’s head dropped, tongue flicking out to groom Ash’s cheek viciously.
Ash fell onto her side. She yowled at Callie and waved a paw in her general direction. Startled, Callie jumped back a few inches, bumping against the side of the sofa. Her tail twitched quickly, and she waved a paw back at Ash. Their paws connected! Ash squirmed to her feet and waved her paw again. “Yowl!”
Taken aback by this display of power and ferocity, Callie backed out from under the end table and away from the other cat. She glanced around for easier prey. Aha -- a hair elastic!
Pounce!
… because when I think of incompetent fighters, I think of my cats.
Anyway, thanks to you both for the prompts! n.n | | comments: 9 comments or Leave a comment |
| | I forgot to bring my book of writing exercises to work today. Anyone want to give me an assignment? n.n | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| octantis did a picture for me of The Laughing Lady, from the Honored PBEM that ran for a few months last year. Squee!
*
More character generation writing exercises. These ones are based on "found language", with the idea being that you look at writing in whatever happens to be around you, and develop a character based on the "voice" of that text. The first sample text is from a theatre playbill, and I'm supposed to describe a character based on it.
Richard Arnison burst onto the scene when he was hired as an usher at the Starlight Theatre three months ago. He's been involved with productions of Cats, Beauty and the Beast, and Avenue Q. He appears on stage nightly -- at least, on Friday and Saturday nights, when it's his turn to sweep up.after the performance. All right, so he's not an actor. So he's not even part of the show's crew, carrying props or managing lights or applying make-up. So he's not even allowed to talk to the actors. He's still working in theater, though. Or at least, at the theater.
The next one is some gooshy excerpts from a magazine, and I'm supposed to craft a letter to the editor from an imaginary reader.
Dear Editor:
Thank you so much for your tireless efforts in producing your wonderful magazine. I love the positive, encouraging nature of your stories and articles even when they're about somber topics, like the way Linda Harrellson manages her mother's Alzheimer's in "All the Things I've Forgotten". I never had a close relationship with my own mother. She preferred to spend her time teaching my brothers to play catch or repair cars, rather than host tea parties or shop for clothes. I hope to give my daughters, age 2 and 4, all the attention and devotion I missed growing up. Your loving articles about the strong bonds between mothers and daughters are the perfect guidepost. I am more grateful than you can imagine for the role model your magazine provides me.
Your devoted reader,
Cecilia E.
Arrlington, NY
*
Next one is do-it-yourself. I picked a friend's summary of one month's worth of events in the Marvel Universe.
"Good morning, Glenda. It's good to be back at work. I'm glad to see you weathered the Atlantis invasion, too."
"I stayed home through it all, Frank, and watched the Fantastic Four fight them off on TV. Boy! What a relief that's over, huh? You'd think with all the money they spend on national defense our military could've done something. We should hand their budget to Reed Richards."
"No kidding. Especially with saboteurs wrecking the defense contractor's plants. What's the point in throwing money away on research someone's going to destroy, or worse, steal?"
"At least Iron Man caught the saboteurs."
"But not before they'd done some damage. Hey, morning, Bernie, I was starting to worry about you. Overslept?"
"I wish. No, the bus I was on got grabbed by the Sandman. He threw the whole bus at Spiderman! Thank god Spiderman caught us in one of his webs, or I'd be the late Bernie, instead of Bernie, late."
"My goodness! Are you okay? Shouldn't you go home and take it easy after an experience like that?"
"Naw, Glenda. If I called in after every brush with a supervillain, I'd never get any work done."
"Don't you think those 'rescues' are a little too convenient? The Bugle says Sandman and Spiderman stage those fights."
"Are you kidding, Frank? I was there. It sure didn't look staged to me."
"Well, pro wrestling doesn't look staged either."
"Yes it does."
"Glenda! Frank! Bernie! Come quick, there's a big leafy guy leading an army of trees out of Central Park!"
"Whoa! Glenda, you coming?"
"No, you guys go look. I gotta get this memo typed up by ten. Let me know if the Avengers or someone doesn't show up to stop him, okay?"
...
I don't think I had quite the right idea for that one. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| The book had another exercise in this vein where it gave me three prompts and I was supposed to write about the resulting character, but it was even duller than the drug addict one. Also, the pre-made prompts are all very ordinary things because the book is aimed at writing straight fiction rather than genre, and straight fiction is also boring. So instead I made up my own prompts. Twice, because the last exercise in the chapter was "make up your own".
Controlling idea: Rule the world
Primary Orientation: Prophet
Fundamental question: Am I doing the right thing?
Elena was seven when she had her first vision. An angel in the form of a white stag with antlers of lightning and twelve wings of mist and storm clouds leapt from a chasm to land before her as she was raking leaves. He told her that it was her destiny either to rule the world or destroy it. "If you do not do the former, you will surely do the latter." He told her that she would have more visions, some sent by the gods, as he was, and some by demons. "The demons will torment you and tempt you. They will try to break your spirit, and they will try to lead you astray. Do not heed them."
"How will I know which is which?" Elena had asked.
"An angel will never lead you to cruelty. Only firmness. Demon and angels alike will give you gifts. This is mine." He touched her with an outstretched wing of silvery cloud. Elena fell backwards into the pile of leaves, startled, and was even more surprised as the leaves turned to fluffy white cotton beneath her. When she struggled to her feet again, he was gone.
Elena is twenty-eight now. She has had one hundred sixteen visions since that day; by her reckoning, seventy-eight of them were from demons. Sometimes the demons were easy to tell, like the time one who tormented her for a week with torturous sensations: stabbing pains in her hands and feet, burning brands that left demonic marks only she could see on her torso, making her feel flayed alive so that the touch of any cloth to her body was torture. Some of them are harder: was the one who showed her vision after vision of a desolate, ruined world from a demon trying to break her spirit, or an angel trying to warn her that she was on the wrong path? Some were easy to tell, yet tempting anyway. The Gift from one demon had been the ability to heal any disease or injury to any one member of any given race -- if first she killed a healthy individual of the same race.
Elena's rule spans eight countries and two continents. She conquered them without force; three kings pledged their fealty to her, and two republics amended their constitutions to make her themselves states in her empire.
Eight countries in twenty-one years. She will have to move faster if she is to rule the world. She prays for guidance and divine assistance, knowing that often it is worse when she receives it than if she does not.
She has one hundred sixteen Gifts. Some are simple and strange, like turning leaves to cotton at will. Others are subtle and amazing, like ignoring a train whistle going off next to her in order to overhear a conversation a thousand yards away. Still others are terrifying and spectacular, like calling down flaming balls of lava from the sky. She has used thirty-nine of her Gifts.
Often she wonders if the use of that one, questionable Gift means it is already too late. That the demons have already won, and she will never rule the world, only destroy it.
Controlling idea: Stop the cats!
Primary Orientation: Lunatic
Fundamental question: How can he cure everyone else?
Chosoon is a professional crazy person, in the province of Jade Valley where the priests teach that lunatics are touched by the gods and holy, to be treated with reverence and honored. Chosoon may be crazy, but he's not crazy enough to believe that. He knows he hasn't been touched by the gods, and it's not the gods that made him crazy.
It's the cats.
Cats hypnotize people with their purr, and then take control of their minds. They turn them into unimaginative drones who toil endlessly in factories and fields, with no concerns beyond the necessities of life, carnal pleasures, and spiritual matters. They no longer put their minds to ... to ... Chosoon's not sure exactly what they should be putting their minds to, because when the cats realized he was immune to their purr, they used a combination of mewing and brushing-against-ankles to drive him to madness. He knows that humans are meant for a higher purpose than grubbing for food, procreating, and worshipping the gods, who are probably a feline invention anyway. He can't remember what the purpose is, but he knows it's out there, and he knows about the cats, and that gives him a big advantage over most people. The cats have brainwashed all the other people so that they don't believe him when he tries to explain about the cats and purring. They just think he's crazy. Which is understandable, seeing as he is, but it's all because of the cats! He's trying to establish an alliance with the dogs, who obviously understand what the cats are plotting because no other carnivore hounds another carnivore as relentlessly as dogs do cats. Unfortunately, the cats have also driven most dogs insane, with the result that they only communicate in cryptic barks. Chosoon is trying to teach his pack of pet dogs to make a language of barks so that they can better coordinate their war against the cats. Maybe if he could find a way to turn the cats' purr against him, but they've been unaffected by his efforts at purring back at them so far. And he dare not stay in their presence long, because sometimes when he does he finds his will to resist weakening, and that soft purr convincing him that really, they're only dumb animals and maybe he should go get a regular job, or at least eat more regularly. But no! That way lie madness! No, wait, this way lies madness. That way lies the path of the mindless drones who have succumbed to the nefarious feline plot. He may be crazy, but at least he's not working twelve hours a day in a factory. | | comments: 11 comments or Leave a comment |
| Write:
* 12 entries to my LJ this month, mostly short ones. Not including this one.
* Two of them were writing exercises, which probably should count separately.
* Three RP sessions with Brenna.
* Still in the X-Men PBEM, though that really doesn't require much writing. It's very different in gameplay and feel from the other PBEMs I've been in.
* I've generally been better about supporting other people's fiction efforts (sythyry, terrycloth and level_head come to mind for this month) than writing my own. I'm not very happy with my own writing lately, so commenting on someone else's is arguably a better use of my time anyhow.
Draw:
On February 1, koogrr and I went All Fired Up and I painted one and a half plates. I also did a bunch of icons for people for Valentine's Day. I'll count that as two art points for February.
Play:
* I let my WAR account expire in January, because I'd gotten kind of tired of it, Lut wasn't playing any more, and while terrycloth would still play it, on any given day he'd rather play City of Heroes/Villains.
* Lut renewed his CoH account and the three of us have been playing it together for several hours a week. This month, we even completed three task forces, which we rarely do because they take a chunk of time (not a big deal) and four to eight people (eeeee! Organizing!) We tried a fourth, but abandoned it after deciding we just didn't have the right mix to complete the last mission. Which was really long. It wouldn't've been so bad if the end boss hadn't been horribly buggy in addition to ridiculously dangerous.
* Been playing even more Puzzle Pirates. This is a horribly antisocial game, barely better than a solo game, really. But I adore the puzzles. I've been pillaging more, which is very slightly less antisocial than my usual crafting puzzles. I've also tried some of the "new" content (ie, put in since 2006, which was the last time I paid attention)
Eat:
Um ... I'm eating. And tracking what I eat. Oh, wait, I can put it into a useable format for number crunching. *does that*
Okay, apparently I'm averaging 1681 calories a day. Which is theoretically enough that I'll lose weight eventually. I haven't noticably done so yet. I should probably try harder. Also, I'm not paying attention during the weekends, so the average is probably skewed downwards. Anyway, at least I'm not gaining weight now.
Exercise:
I'm averaging five days a week and a little over 20 minutes a day. I'd really like to edge that average up to 30 minutes a day again. It's pretty rare that I do over 20 minutes in a session. Still, 20 minutes x 5 days/week was my goal, so yay.
Visit:
Um. I went to a bar after work with some coworkers for drinks this week. Yeah, I don't get out much.
Live:
*whimper*
I think the most productive thing I did around the house in February was change the lightbulb in the exercise room. Which, granted, did require finding a screwdriver and took me several months to get around to doing, so it sort of counts. Oh, and I hacked back some of the junk trees and bushes in the yard. So not quite completely useless. Just mostly useless.
Be happy:
Not doing so hot on this count, either. | | comments: 2 comments or Leave a comment |
| How to spend your eight bucks!
These are answers from economists to a question posed by the Wall Street Journal, not an article in the Onion, so some of the answers are serious. But you can tell it was a struggle for some of them to answer with a straight face. My favorite:
Paul Kasriel, Northern Trust: I would use the extra cash to start a hedge fund, which would purchase newly-issued asset-backed securities. I would finance my position through the Fed’s TALF program. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Fundamental Questions:
Questions humans ask about their lives. Existential stuff.
General:
* Why am I here? Should I quit my job? Do I want a family? What does it mean to be a hero? How can a just God love Hitler? If there is no afterlife, what values are worth dying for? Is free will an illusion? Does it make a difference if it isn't? Does anything really matter? What? If I'm not the center of the universe, what is? Did I make the right choice? How will I know? What do women want? What do men what? What's wrong with us anyway? Am I crazy? Is that my problem?
For me:
* What makes me happy? How do I get it? Is happiness sustainable? Am I asking the right questions? Why don't normal things make sense to me? Why do I want to write? Do I have to exercise? Why do I like playing games so much? Do people like me? Am I good at my job? At my hobbies? Am I doing the right thing?
Attach a fundamental question to a character:
* Pilar: How can I escape?
How does this question affect the character?
* Pilar daydreams about leaving her husband. Sometimes she imagines taking her sone with her, and sometimes she abandons him too. She does web research on shelters and on plane ticket prices. She plots escape routes with Google Maps. She is furtive, careful to clear the cache lest anyone find out. She whispers her plans to a tree in her backyard while she's out gardening, because she doesn't trust anyone else. She hoards the change left over from shopping trips to fund her escape. She applies for a credit card from one of the pre-approved offers, and checks the mail every day as soon as the postman comes so her husband won't find out. She lives in fear: of what will happen if anyone finds out what she wants, and of what her husband might do while she's there. And that she will never actually leave.
Controlling idea: get high
* Sniff glue, drink cough syrup, huff markers and airspray. Study chemistry to find out how to make his own drugs. Grow pot in the basement. Bring sick strays to the vet to get painkillers for them and take them himself. Drink Red Bull by the case, and don't sleep for a week to get sleep-deprivation hallucinations.
Primary orientation: junkie
* Dropped out of normal life; doesn't even try. Begs with a sign saying "I'll just spend it on drugs and booze". Gets hassled by the cops: "Hey, man, ain't you ever heard of sarcasm?" Only spends money on drugs: nothing else is worth paying for. Sits through sermons to get soup kitchen handouts. Crashes on the couches at friends' places until they kick him out. Uses the net at the library to look for places to buy.
Fundamental question: Will I score?
"I used to work for a living, y'know. I did. Had a place in the suburbs, had an 8 to 5 job, did my time on the daily commute. A steady paycheck. A wife and 2.6 kids. I threw it all away for a high, man.
"And you know what? I'd do it again.
"You stand there in your fancy suit and expensive tie and feel sorry for me. I don't need your pity. You keep it for yourself, dude, all wrapped up in your cellophane fantasy of the real world, all tied down with your job that might lay you off, and your house that's mortgaged for 150% of its value, and your 401(k) that ain't worth the pixels it's displayed with. You're trapped by your stuff, man. You don't own it. It owns you. It tells you when to work, when to eat, when to sleep, when to shit. It kills your dreams and eats you alive, one precious minute at a time. Those minutes are all that were ever really yours, and you gave them up to smother in that airless void that you think is the real world.
"It's not. The real world is a million miles away, and just one step off the track of that thousand-ton freight train of responsibilities. It's just on the other side of a veil you don't dare to step through. It's full of things you can't imagine and feelings you'll never experience. You think a chemical rush is a cheap imitation of true contentment, but it isn't. True contentment is bullshit. It's a cheap imitation of a chemical rush. It's a quack that sedates you so that you don't notice how hollow it really is.
"I got the real thing here, buddy. Truth in a bottle, in a bong, in a needle, in a fucking glue tube, however you get to it it's better than that sham I used to think I was content with. I get a better trip off of a week with no sleep than you do from your weekend in Bermuda, and it doesn't cost me a dime. It's ecstasy. It takes me to the real world, the world inside me where everything makes sense, where words and ideas have the meaning and the power they ought to.
"You call me irresponsible? Say I ain't doin' my part for Society? Well, what's Society ever done for me? What's it do for you? Society doesn't exist for our benefit, bro. It exists because it can. It's one big parasite, sucking all the individuals in with its One Big Lie: 'It's for your own good.' I'm irresponsible? Buddy, I'm not the guy who got a mortgage on a half-million dollar house I couldn't afford because I was 'sure' I could sell it for a million in a year. It wasn't me who handed out 'stated income' loans to guys I knew were lying. It wasn't me who bought mortgage-backed securities on terms I didn't understand, because I knew Uncle Sam would pick up the bill if it didn't work. I'm not the one who voted for those Congressional schmoes who made it all possible. I'm not the one who ran up my credit cards for that big screen TV with the TIVO box because it was 0% interest for six months. I'm not the one who figured that when the Internet bust because it was nothing but a tulip-bulb craze that the cure should be another tulip-bulb craze, only this time with houses. I'm not the one who decided that the solution for a housing market that bust because loans were made on overpriced houses to people who couldn't afford them at rates that banks couldn't make money at was to make even more loans at even lower rates to even more people. Because the real problem with a Ponzi scheme isn't that it's a Ponzi scheme, right? It's that you ran out of suckers. I'm not the one screwing up your screwed-up system, man. You're doing it to yourselves. I'm a junkie, buddy, I'm not an idiot.
"You wanna help me? Gimme enough for a nickel bag. 'Cause there ain't nothin' in your world that I want 'cept a ticket out. And I know, one way or another, that's what I'm gonna get." | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| I decided to do some more writing exercises. This is the latest batch.
Controlling Idea:
This could be just as easily stated as "primary goal". What's the character trying to do? Some examples from my own characters:
Damon Kildare: Solve the challenge
Madden: Become Kildare's familiar
Zenobia Gardsmark: Learn to do magic
Sir Gardsmark: Protect his daughter
Archon Skotonys: Serve Tyr Notios
Alice Bocor: Make new friends! Out of dead ones if necessary!
Isadora Weaver: Find her brother
Make a new character by starting with a controlling idea: love everyone
* After a brush with death, investment banker Jack Roarke is reborn with manic love for all God's people. He devotes himself to finding ways to express this love; even with perfect conviction, it's still not an easy thing to do.
Generate a story idea by using characters with conflicting controlling ideas:
* Callie has boundless energy and doesn't want to do anything but Play All Day, while Ash just wants to rest and sleep. Can Ash find a game Callie will play without her? What happens when Callie pushes Ash past the breaking point?
What is my controlling idea:
* Get my balance.
Primary Orientation: what a character most identifies himself as.
Damon Kildare: Warlock
Madden: Focus
Zenobia Gardsmark: Student
Sir Gardsmark: defender of the people
Archon Skotonys: archon
Alice Bocor: little girl
Isadora Weaver: tinkerer
Primary orientation predicts behavior. What does a fairy do?
* Rumple Blossom kept a running mental tally as she flitted to the next flower. One thousand two hundred forty-three .... She poured out a few drops of dew from a cup made of a beetle's carapace, and sprinkled on a little fairy dust from a fox-glove pouch. The petals unfolded at the touch of the fairy dust, glistening in the light of dawn. One thousand two hundred forty-four -- and that's the whole yard! Done at last. She tied up the pouch with cornsilk, and flew to an abandoned bird's nest to catch a well-earned nap.
What is your primary orientation:
* Writer. I had a really long answer here, but "writer" covers it better than anything else. Not an author, not a fiction writer, not an RPer or a storyteller. Someone who writes. That's all.
Generate a story idea from the conflict between controlling idea and primary orientation:
* A gang leader converts to Christianity. He turns himself in to the police, but struggles with how to treat his former gang members, and how to make amends to his victims. | | comments: 5 comments or Leave a comment |
| "You should try drinking apple juice," Lut said. "I'm sure it's one of those clear liquids people say you should drink when you're sick."
I don't normally drink fruit juices, because they're loaded with calories and I don't like drinking my calories. But it occurred to me that when a single serving of oatmeal (150 calories) looks intimidatingly large, it's probably not the time to be worrying about getting too many calories.
So I'm drinking apple juice now.
I don't really feel sick anymore, or rather, I've gone from the state of "uncomfortably ill" to "comfortably ill". I'm tired, I don't want to move, I'm sleeping a lot, and I don't want to eat. But I'm not nauseated any more, and my body's not all achey. Staying home from work today was probably reasonable, given that I slept until after noon, but I'm pretty sure I'll go in tomorrow. | | comments: 1 comment or Leave a comment |
| I've been reading here and there about the economic stimulus bill in Congress, but not very much about it in LJ. Which made me curious what my friends think of it. Hence, a quickie poll!
Poll #1346426 Stimulating!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllIn general, government spending for economic stimulus is: If passed, the specific economic stimulus bill under consideration by Congress at the present time would do:
Also, if any of you are so inclined, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts in detail. :) | | comments: 31 comments or Leave a comment |
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Rowyn
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