avocadia

Archives, eh

• # Links for 2008-02-29

  • High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace ✴
  • gilmae
  • 29/02/2008
  •  0 followups
  • • cool

• # Something to hold onto

  They always told us, don’t sleep when you start to lose touch. Putting yourself into a semi-hallucinatory state is ill-advised when your walls are thin. But then, if you lose too much sleep you’ll start to lose touch. My first tutor told me that its a fine line that each of us would need to find for ourselves; the point where you might as well get it over with, because there’s no stopping it now.

  Every class tries to come up with solutions. The tutors shake their heads and point out that the solutions are the same ones the previous class thought up and the class before that, and the class before that. A partner to watch over you and wake you if you start to project, except the partner is usually the second to fall into the projection. Drugs to knock you out and give dreamless sleep; but really it is just that you don’t remember the dreams even if you do wake up again. Every class remembers the names of students who tried their ideas and are – at best – dead now.

  Maybe you just have to find something, anything, that you can hold on to. That lets you hang on to the illusion. Maybe you just really need to want to hang on. It’s the fate of the Touched to just give up and fade away into reality if we don’t die violently; maybe those students who don’t make it were weak, were never going to make it anyway.

  I hope so, because so far, after these past few years gone renegade I’m still here; despite having lost the beat. I’ve still got something to do and I’m not leaving till it’s done.

  Just in case it isn’t obvious the narrator is the same narrator as the first of these micro stories I dumped here.

  When I was still playing D&D I had been on and off creating a game world. Even after I stopped playing D&D I’d keep dreaming up and refactoring that fictional world. I by no means think I am Tolkien. Anyway, these little micro stories started becoming a way of recording some of those ideas.

  • gilmae
  • 26/02/2008
  •  4 followups

• # A Memory of Light

  From the wikipedia entry on A Memory of Light, the forthcoming last book in the Wheel of Time dodecaologyⁱ

  Brandon Sanderson has said in a December 19, 2007 interview that some parts of the book were nearly finished by (Robert) Jordan, while others have only a couple of paragraphs to describe a twenty page scene.

  wikipedia

  To be fair though, for any other author those couple of paragraphs would be the scene. No sentences detailing the exact configuration of breasts, folded arms and braids; no implausible mis-communication requiring three books to resolve; very little growling, sniffing or other miscellaneous human-emitted noises that are the prose equivalent of…um…like, ‘err’.

  Apparently this guy they picked out to finish the goddamn series, Brandon Sanderson, is re-reading the whole series just to re-familiarise himself with it all and blogging about it.

  It used to be my habit to read through them all when a new one came out, but life got too busy and the series too long for me to do that with the later books.

  Yeah. Maybe there’s something in that, neh? Think about it the very first time you sit down to inflate some of those ‘few paragraphs’.

  Thanks for the link, by the way.

  ---

  ⁱ If that is the actual word to describe a twelve-part series, it is entirely coincidentale.

  • gilmae
  • 25/02/2008
  •  2 followups
  • • wheel_of_time

• # Links for 2008-02-24

  • Rails Messaging Tutorial ✴
  • TextDrive Weblog: Optimizing Rails Resource Usage ✴
  • cfis : How to Profile Your Rails Application ✴
  • gilmae
  • 24/02/2008
  •  0 followups
  • • design
    • Rails
    • Tutorial
    • performance
    • optimization
    • programming

• # Links for 2008-02-23

  • colbertwowcs1.jpg (JPEG Image, 1206×905 pixels) – Scaled (91%) ✴
  • gilmae
  • 23/02/2008
  •  0 followups
  • • cool
    • colbert
    • art

• # Links for 2008-02-22

  • Unasked-For Advice to New Writers About Money ✴
  • gilmae
  • 22/02/2008
  •  0 followups
  • • advice
    • finance

• # The Lesson

  A god awful effort, but I may as well post them all.

  ”...but the Late Gods were greedy and willful and resented Iel’s advice. Don’t you think it is wise to listen to your elders, children?”

  “Yes, Friend Portis,” they chorused. They sat on the grass beneath the tree while the Friend talked to them and taught them the story of the Fall. Their teacher stood a pace or so behind him, so that the children had something familiar.

  “Iel loved them but he foresaw that their stubborness was leading creation the wrong way. Afterall, Iel was in charge, and those in charge know what is best for us, don’t they children?”

  “Like our parents, Friend Portis?”

  “Our parents, yes, and our priest and our town elders. And Empress Joan, of course.”

  ‘There it is,’ the teacher mused.

  “However the Late Gods did not see this. They weren’t even as clever as you, children” He waited for the nervous giggles to subside. “They rebelled against Iel and attacked him and their priests attacked the Emperor. They attacked Iel and weakened him. He could not keep up the walls of Reality and the Demon Horde attacked! The Late Gods saw this and even they were not foolish enough to ignore the Horde. They stopped fighting Iel and turned to fight the demons. They were killed but it gave Iel enough time to repair Reality and then smite the remaining demons. But because of the Late Gods our homeland was destroyed. The Emperor lead the remains of the citizenry north here to our new homeland.”

  “My father told me that that story is a cover up, Friend. What does that mean?” one little girl asked.

  “Maybe I should speak with your father, child. What is your name?”

  The teacher felt his heart wrench in pity. ‘Oh you poor child, what have you done?’

  • gilmae
  • 21/02/2008
  •  0 followups

• # To Compare is to Know

  Yeah, so I occasionally write micro stories on this other site

  Every Apprentice House was mandated to have two staff members at all times who were referred to as the Anchors. Traditionally each Apprentice House also maintained a training house for Anchors, as far away from their own apprentices as possible.

  Not all Apprentice Houses managed this; it was expensive enough maintaining two fully-trained Anchors. Most were jointly sponsoring a music college in Chiel and recruited new Anchors from there. An Anchor’s duties were crucial to a musician anyway, so it was a cheap alternative.

  At the Apprentice House I lived in till my graduation, the two Anchors were both old men. Art was the elder by a couple of decades, which was unusual. It was normal for the backwash from all the reality distortion around them to affect an Anchor after a decade. That’s why there were two, for comparison. Art had been at the House for twenty-five years and outlasted his elder and two juniors.

  An Anchor must keep precise time. Sounds simple. It is not. They must be able to count off the seconds with flawless regularity. It is critical for the Touched to keep their sense of time and space in sync with that of the Illusion. Losing one’s grasp on the illusion around us is the pebble that starts a landslide into dementia and psychosis and – inevitably – loss of humanity.

  The fear of that is pervasive, even amongst the journeymen who otherwise seem to think themselves immortal. That was me for the first three years after my graduation.

  Then one morning after my own test I had to witness a comparison between Art and the other Anchor, Tomas. Art failed. I never told a soul that my count and his were in sync; it would have meant the medicine for me. I just left and never returned.

  Never mind that if it is as important as all that, someone would have known the counts matched and thought “Hey, we better arrest that other guy toot sweet”. I imagine there was some hand waving explanation for that logical flaw in the first draft that got cut in the editing process that turns a quick vignette into this micro story.

  By micro story I mean fitting within 300 words; I keep getting told this is more of a guideline, but a) Following Strunk & White has made these little flash fics immeasurably better than the first drafts, and b) I steadfastly refuse to acknowledge his Pirates reference.

  Anyway, I figure I might as well cross post them here as well.

  • gilmae
  • 20/02/2008
  •  0 followups

• # Links for 2008-02-19

  • The Arrival by Shaun Tan ✴
  • gilmae
  • 19/02/2008
  •  0 followups
  • • books
    • review

• # Links for 2008-02-18

  • Coding Day : JSON Tools for .NET ✴
  • gilmae
  • 18/02/2008
  •  0 followups
  • • .Net
    • json

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357 days since 29/11/2007