From a pacing perspective, it was quite interesting to see -- almost 80 pages are taken up by the first fight scene. Quite a bit of this is it devolving into talking (which is very effective, at showing the effectiveness of the character/his mission, and at keeping things interesting), but still -- if that’s what your scenes are like, you simply can’t have many fights in a book.
The plotting was very good throughout -- secrets and escalations and hidden motivations/fears which all made sense in context and were sort of hinted at, but imo fairly hard to figure out ahead of time, because that’s not the kind of book this is. It really didn’t pause for reflection that much, and where it did (e.g. looking at the lives of those living under the Epics), it felt like it kind of stumbled. At the same time, the pacing (and the rate at which I read it) were kind of breakneck.
My main criticism of the content is that I found the ending a little too abruptly happy. (Spoilers, in case anyone both is reading this tumblr and cares).
In particular, I didn’t like that his dad just....is back. I thought that the Steelheart hero in the alternate reality was Steelheart, but a good guy, and that David was going to have to work through that. I guess he still is, but it seems both easier & overshadowed by this being his long-lost dad. Also, I’m kind of pissed that he gets powers, and in particular that it be those powers (though they are definitely fitting), because it messes so heavily with my conception of who he becomes after this war of the epics. Like...he’s no longer the human that stuck through it and won the war. He’s become one of them, like Prof. And that’s gotta suck too, so yay complexity.
What happens when really old advice meets really new technology?
A recurrent neural network (like the open-source char-rnn framework used here) can teach itself to imitate recipes, paint colors, band names, and even guinea pig names. By examining a dataset, it learns to formulate its own rules about it, and can use these rules to generate new text that - according to the neural network - resembles the dataset. But since the neural network is doing all this without cultural context, or any knowledge of what the words really mean, the results are often a bit bizarre.
In this example, the dataset is a list of more than 2000 ancient proverbs, collected by reader Anthony Mandelli. Some of these are well-known, such as “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” and “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Others are frankly a bit strange: “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” and “A curst cow has short horns.” and “Be not a baker if your head is made of butter.”
What will a neural network make of this ancient wisdom?
If you answered “Really really weird proverbs”, you are correct.
A fox smells it better than a fool’s for a day.
No songer in a teacuper.
A fool in a teacup is a silent for a needle in the sale.
No man is the better pan on the hunder.
A mouse is a good bound to receive.
Do not come to the cow.
Some of them almost make sense:
A good wine makes the best sermon.
A good fear is never known till needed.
Death when it comes will have no sheep.
An ounce of the heart comes without an exception.
A good face is a letter to get out of the fire.
No wise man ever wishes to be sick.
A good excuse is as good as a rest.
There is no smoke without the best sin.
A good man is worth doing well.
A good anvil does not make the most noise.
While others would be more difficult to pass off as real proverbs:
We can serve no smort.
A good face is a letter like a dog.
A good earse makes a good ending.
Gnow will not go out.
Ung.
A fox smeep is the horse of the best sermon.
No sweet is half the barn door after the cat.
There is not fire and step on your dog and stains the best sermon.
An ox is a new dogn not sing in a haystar.
One of the oddest things to emerge from the proverb-trained neural network is a strange obsession with oxen. I checked, and there were only three oxen-related proverbs in the dataset, yet they appear frequently in the neural network’s version, and usually as rather powerful creatures.
An ox can lever an enemies are dangerous and restens at home.
An ox is not to be given with a single stone.
An ox is never known till needed.
An ox is as good as a best.
An ox is not to be that wound is hot.
An ox is a silent for the gain of the bush.
An ox is not fill when he will eat forever.
Whatever the internal mythos the neural network has learned from these ancient proverbs, oxen are mysteriously important.
I wish there were a conservative party anywhere that was conservative in the sense of ‘it rarely gets the computer working to smash it and also it rarely gets the country working to smash it, our policies will all be reversible and tested before they are scaled up and we will treasure and reinforce stabilizing institutions like the courts and good diplomatic relations with our neighbors’.
This seems like a nice thing in principle, but might have some serious issues when it meets with reality, such that it’s really hard to determine what you actually stand for.
What’s your economic position? Are you totally-hand-off-free-market? What about government funding for programs like basic research?
What if neighbours don’t want good relations with you? Do you play tit-for-tat? Or do you still play nice at cost to yourself? At what cost?
How will you cope with radical technological & social change? Do you need to run & assess small-scale experiments before it’s allowed to happen?
More to the point, “treasure and reinforce stabilizing institutions” is kind of a big thing that existing conservatives care about. Except it’s not just “the courts & good diplomatic relations”, it’s heteronormativity, for social conservatives. And to be fair, that is kind of an institution with a long history.
Though, on the plus side: normally “as boring as possible” would be a poor electoral strategy, but I think the time may be right about now.
This year, I got to be a judge, following the tradition of asking the winners back. This was a lot a lot of fun. I was able to relax much more and enjoy the show, though there certainly was some gears-churning-thinking-about-what-questions-I-can-ask. This was motivated by kind of being on the spot, and some discussions beforehand – is it better to ask deadpan serious questions, amping up the humour-from-seriousness? Or just go for laughs? In the end, I think I did reasonably well at both, though that does entail sacrificing some ability to be deadpan.
So, just for the sake of airing out the thoughts that have been trapped in my skull for too long, here are the questions I asked, and some of the thoughts I had on what else I could have said:
James Propp – Dinosaur extinction by temporary gravitational reversal. Midway through, I thought up a question about pterodactyls – but found it answered very well in the presentation. I ended up asking about geological evidence, which I thought did reasonably well for taking it seriously, and which I thought was setting him up to talk about erratics (boulders a long way from home). His answer was basically “well, this is why we need more research”, which suggests it was less of a setup than it could have been. The other thing I had in mind was something about “how can we try to detect this dark matter”, and that may have had a more engaging response.
Olivia Walch – Stress & anger at terrible young people keeps old people healthy. I asked about practical applications, specifically for teenagers who would like to come into their inheritance sooner. Nice laugh from the audience, but little room for her to elaborate, since it was pretty straightforward in terms of her theory. When it came to the somewhat-inevitable “that sounds like murder” from Jodi, though, I kind of wish I had responded with “only in a statistical sense”.
Ben Tolkin – Aggression towards overly cute things. I asked about getting a more quantitative cuteness score by getting people to rate cute pictures on Amazon Turk. His response: scientists have already done this.
Beth Bearce – Weasels as Higgs Boson detectors. I asked about anyone noticing the difference when replacing physicists, and the possibilities of a menagerie of particle-particular animals, such as meson marmots and electron eels. Kind of softball, but also fun. I’m not sure it gave her much of an opportunity to respond with anything other than agreement, though.
Michael Anderson – Proposal to hire Conway & Spicer as MIT physics faculty, on the basis of their quantum politics. I had thought of ceding my question to Max Tegmark, because physics & MIT faculty & the personal references to him. But I ended up with a decent question of my own: as a faculty hiring committee that Cares About Teaching, is there any evidence of these candidates’ abilities? He answered with a bonus slide (his second!) that kind of sort of addressed the point, with something about different multiverses. In hindsight, I wish I’d specified in this branch of the multiverse, and/or set up something specifically for Max.
Jerry Wang – Babies as universal codebreakers/encryption devices. I led with a comment about knowing he was a biologist from his relationship to acronyms (there were a lot, all pleasantly corny). This got a laugh, but I wish I had specified “bioinformatics”. It’s more accurate to what he does, and also a better fit for the joke (and probably audience). The actual question I had was about clarifying the fault-tolerance of baby computers. I think this was a pretty good, straightforward technical-ish question. He responded with something about redundancy in numbers, along with a few other considerations which I forget.
So, those are my overly specific thoughts on my role as judge in the improv game that is BAHFest. Of course, it is improv, dwelling on specifics after the fact isn’t exactly the best way to improve. Also, the emphasis here is highly distorted in being my personal view – the other judges had good questions too, which a unique style. Nonetheless, this kind of reflection is a thing that brains are prone to do, so I thought I’d share it.
I read this while (mostly) bussing to Toronto yesterday. It was a fun read, very much in the style of high fantasy.
~ SPOILERS ~
Aerin is out of place at her father’s castle, because Mysterious Backstory of Her Mother. She’s fairly isolated and listles. Of the people who are characters, there’s Galanna who hates her guts and is vain and petty; Perlith who is her husband and quite well matched (though somewhat too minor a character to matter); Tor who is a Proper Prince except when he sometimes caves to teach her swordfighting, and is also kind of pathetically in love with her in that trademarked fantasy way, Aerlith (sp?) who is her father the king, and busy king-ing, and whose only moments we get to see are him being not so dumb as everyone believes; Talat, her Improbably Competent Horse; Teka, her nursemaid/servant/minor character who sometimes gets in the way as a small obstacle to be thwarted and the rest of the time is just a doting presence at various sickbeds. I guess you can tell that I don’t particularly like the characters. (That statement extends to Mysteriously Wise Yet for Plot Reasons Conveniently Useless Mage Dude later on, as well.)
However, I do like the story. It’s a classic arc of small problems to bigger problems to cosmic problems, and it’s fairly well set up. Certainly her training to fight dragons, based on This One Old Book She Read, ramps up very well. Her struggles (making kenet, learning to fight, rehabilitating Talat, getting out of the castle so she can go fight stuff) are shown convincingly and engagingly; it’s the sort of story whose predictability in no way detracts from the enjoyment. I found the later escalation of tension against the Big Bad to be fairly abrupt and unclear, since we had neither much sense of how the magic worked or any particular intelligence on the part of the villain. This all made her victory somewhat unconvincing. However, the tension in setting up the family relation to the Big Bad (no, not Anikin Skywalker), along with its resolution of these nebulous features of her destiny, made it somewhat more satisfying. As for the romantic arcs, I found them similarly tired – shy secluded girl suddenly gets, in a short span of time, two excellent attractive guys who are both in love with her. In this case, she even manages to be with both of them, due to the whole immortality thing.
This book is considerably older than I thought. I’m not sure where precisely fantasy was as a genre in the 1980s, but I’m sure that many of the tropes I am tired of were new and exciting then. I worry that my response to this is, in fact, insufficiently new and exciting based on all that has come since. However. Let’s proceed to the beef.
To be clear, this is my beef with a lot of fantasy of this type, not just this book. And it’s not to say it’s not enjoyable. Think of it more as a blueprint for the kind of fantasy I’d like to see, and create, more of.
1. There was only one real female character, and in fact very few developed characters at all.
a. Having few characters is a pretty consistent trend in quest-type fantasy novels. That’s fine. Having few female characters – well, I think this comes from a trend at the time, which is to talk more about the frustrations and ambitions of a particular woman, in charge of her own destiny; in doing so, it largely avoids talking about the role of women in a systematic way.
b. It’s unfair to lob this criticism at the book, since it was written 30 years later and partly in response. Nonetheless:
This wasn’t even the original post I saw that expressed this sentiment. (Also, yes, I ‘reblogged’ by copying the image, like a pleb. Fight me. Or challenge me to an embroidery battle, whatever.) But: this. There are so many interesting subtle things that can be done via the power of female-coded work, and it’s a pity to pass them all up.
2. Magic can be a charming and interesting part of the setting, but I’d really like to avoid the whole arc of “secret destiny makes you a level 100 magic user with superpowered artefacts, after only a brief training montage”. I’m not alone in this. Let’s have the characters do amazing and awesome things by being clever and daring and having good friends, not because of who they are.
3. All the characters are royalty. More broadly, in this type of fantasy, the characters are all powerful royalty, high-ranking nobles who have a shot at becoming powerful royalty, mages, or very occasionally common soldiers (who also, by virtue of destiny and/or fighting really well, tend to have a shot at becoming powerful royalty). But this is sooo unrealistic – 99% of people, or more, have no such chance. That doesn’t mean they can’t be badasses with interesting stories. Let’s tell them.
4. The plot revolves mainly around fighting things. It may be hard to entirely avoid fight scenes, but I’d like to see more drivers of tension. What options are there? Political intrigue, magical or scientific discovery, natural calamities, financial thrillers, fraud, theft, really any crime.
5. Of the core D&D classes (which may seem an odd starting point – but it is closely entwined with so much fantasy, it’s at least an interesting framework to talk about), the vast majority of characters are fighters and wizards. Sometimes fighter-wizards. There are a number of stories about thieves, and they tend to be excellent (ticking many of the boxes described above, for example). There are almost no stories about clerics/priests/healers. It’s easy to think of reasons for this – they’re typically a support role, other characters are the main ones ‘doing stuff’, people who read fantasy may not want a lot of fictional theology, which is pretty densely entangled with what a cleric does. Nonetheless, I’m fairly sure this lack of writing about healers is one reason players are reluctant to play them. And based on all of the above, what do you think I have to say about “unglamorous” main characters?
6. Morality – The Hero and the Crown, like so many fantasies, has a very simplistic good vs evil morality. But what makes the good guys good? And more interestingly, what makes the bad guys bad? Do they have an understandable motivation? Are there moral dilemmas? In this case, the answers are no and no. As I’ve said, that’s fine for a style of fantasy. But I’d prefer a different one. Why do we need to have bad guys anyway? How far can you push the good guys’ flaws?
7. Uncritical use of tropes. Sometimes this is fun, and gives the reader an enjoyable sense of predictability & the sense of a good story. Sometimes it’s lazy, and more to the point a reason for other weaknesses to go unexamined. I’m a fan of mixing it up – having some tropes played straight, and some subverted, especially by complex villains.
If pressed, I’m sure I could add more to this list. However, that’s it for now, since I should go to school.
My broader point is I’m a fan of complex fantasy that makes you think, and that has enough creativity to make the ‘unglamorous’ into a really good story.
Some books do this fairly well. Game of Thrones achieves many of these points, and was pretty revolutionary fantasy as a result. The Traitor Baru Cormorant does so much, much better, at the expense of all your hopes and dreams. #worthit
Not my own, of course. I would hardly be blogging if that were the case. I think. But two good friends are getting married, and it’s very exciting for them! It’s also a nice time to see lots of other people whom I like, and celebrate things together.
Today is also April Fools. I put out the idea of wedding pranks or oddities to the Science Borealis folks on Slack, and got osme interesting responses. Apparently it’s a tradition in some places for the bride to (blindfolded) feel a lineup of butts and select her groom’s butt from all the rest. That would certainly be an interesting choice...
More interestingly, it’s an opportunity for me to interact with religion in a way I normally do not. Because my beliefs and social circles are pretty atheist, there’s a lot of stuff from religious perspectives that I tend to miss.
Recent progress in graduate school: there’s a piece of code that is supposed to find separatrices in dynamical systems. But it has a lot of dependencies that don’t seem to exist online, and its main function doesn’t seem to work either. So either I have to do a lot of troubleshooting with someone else’s code (which is at least reasonably well written), take its ideas and write my own, or do a much less efficient & thorough but simpler method.
Today I went to a lecture by Dr. Jacqueline Feke, put on by FemPhys. Her subject was ancient greek mathematicians, and in particular their tension with philosophy. With hindsight, and the towering fetishization of all things Greek not only in the Western intellectual tradition but their influence elsewhere, it’s tempting to think of them as both well-regarded and integrated with the broader philosophical movement. But, as Dr Feke argued, this was not so.
Her examples were later than classical Greece – 1st to 4th century CE. Partly it was that the works of that period had these longer philosophical introductions, where they were simultaneously situating their work and putting down philosophers.
Hero of Alexandria described mechanics, of the sort he was studying to build siege equipment, as a process of finding tranquility, and not only by keeping your enemies at bay. This seems a bit bizarre, but it was partly an attack on philosophical schools claiming to be about tranquility. In this same introduction and elsewhere, he was also putting down philosophers on this point of pure versus applied philosophy. I don’t recall precisely, but some of the context for this is Socrates saying mathematics was all very well if it was used in pursuit of philosophical growth and truth, and silly and useless otherwise. Philosophy was also divided into pure, which comprised theology, metaphysics, and mathematics, and applied – ethics, politics, and something else, perhaps commerce? But the point was he, or maybe this is now Ptolemy, had to show how mathematics was superior to the other branches of pure philosophy (it can help men lead a good life, and something else), whereas success in applied stuff meant engaging in the world anyway, so go do that and don’t write books at me.
But yeah, while all educated people at the time learned mathematics, very few researched it, and doing so had little prestige (unless you could carve some away from the philosophers). Meanwhile philosophers had tons of competing schools, and everyone did their own philosophy. These mathematicians chose not to. My addition: kind of. She talked about them only having so much time and focus and turning away, but they did have to be very conscious of at least the broad ambitions of philosophy to situate their work as they did.
And there’s other interesting tidbits, like the tension between mathematics and other disciplines or forms of authority, such as saying the division of land according to what is just as a solely geometric problem (hence removing the rather important role of lords). And at that time, mathematics was the minority, and philosophy the dominant view; a situation that has pretty significantly reversed now. Though not completely, universally, or anything. And as a last word, woo plurality! This doesn’t have to be a competition.
As mentioned preiously, this tumblr has been resurrected as a step above journaling. Well, now it’s going to take a plunge. This morning, I had a cool sort of dream, and I decided I didn’t want to lose it. It was cool parahuman stuff, though reasonably incoherent. Dream below.
Tenegrity
A couple of children are descended from both humans and magical forces (somewhat anthropomorphized).
The eldest of them has magical powers that are somewhat vague – some teleportation, some charisma, some speed and strength. He’s mainly special because he represents a resurgence in these demihumans, who haven’t been seen in a few hundred years.
His parents – well it’s kind of unclear who his parents are. He’s raised by his (probable) dad, a similarly charismatic but entirely human fire chief. Possible women who might have been his mother are a cellist with long dark hair, a sensible paramedic girl, and a force of purple darkness that acts as the town’s protector, fuels old magic, and really doesn’t interact with humans too much.
Then gets a little bother. He can teleport completely at will, any time, any place, and is often popping around the house unconsciously as an infant. It’s not entirely clear where he came from, though there is a strong fraternal bond.
The cellist and her (male) partner have a baby, who turns out to be another demihuman. They figure this out after she starts talking at like two months, but don’t really believe it until it’s clear she’s making inhumanly accurate long-range plans and deductions. For example that shemust have a sibling on the way, because the only people the superhumans can marry are each other, and clearly it must be set up that way.
And she does have a sister. Though said sister is really young at the point of our story, idk what her power is. (Nvm, not super young – just underdeveloped)
Our plot begins with the four of them together tearing down the mountainside in semi-virtual reality. (They’re really there, but not interacting with the environment – drones and stuff do it for them; they can see the drones out of the corner of their eye, because inhumanly good senses, but sort of pretend not to. The system was fixed for them by one of their parents/the local magical police force kind of people. Who realized the substantial benefits to the town if they were less bored…also a safety upgrade)
They’re digging around in some spruce trees (alive and fallen) off the road, beside a river. They come across a golden eagle sitting on a low branch, and want to surprise/capture it. But it’s too fast for them and burrows underground (where the drones can’t get it). They accept this and keep on walking. Then they come to a carved standing stone. Kind of a tomb, but with a carved human face. It looks Inca in design, but also has elements of the local native people; this is nowhere near the Inca. Teleporty one goes inside, and 1) Sees piles and piles of gold, in bricks and 2) awakens a long-dormant magical demihuman (though they don’t interact at all).
They kind of freak out and beat it back to the town, but pandemonium is already everywhere. This is Tenegrity. In addition to some other magical powers, of teleportation and stuff, she can make/be nearly exact simulacra of anybody, in fact multiple people at the same time. She pretends to be most members of the town and talks to them and gets their feelings on most other memmebrs of the town, so she knows who everyone knows and how they think. She can read thoughts and set things on fire too; the town knows it’s under magical attack (sirens going off etc.), and the kids return back in disarray to try to set things straight.
But golden boy hides, certain that he’s angered her and she will beat him up; teleporting boy is nowhere to be found; the girls are suffering a lack of planning and something with their mother. Slash just confusion.
Anyway, eventually all the townspeople end up assembled in a cental shopping mall. Fire Chief Dad is there in front; tons of teachers and principals and clerks and other humans are milling about on escalators and so forth. Golden Boy slinks out of addressing the crowd, and instead abruptly announces he’ll go talk to her (in her own section of mall, with magic and tons of duplicated bodies). Not sure if he’ll live of not.
As he goes through, he remarks how she prefers her own company – not only so many bodies of her, but he knows that she has no bodies in the human crowd. He confronts her over his brother, and she replies by letting him hear the sound of his brother’s voice. He thinks she has him trapped, and he goes to crush her head – which she doesn’t really resist, even though this is very dumb of him – until he realizes she can just instantaneously create extradimensional spaces, and his brother loves that.
She reveals that she is the last of the Named Powers, and something something.
Her name is something involving deception and perseverance, though definitely not evil. Except I just made it up. (Awkward. Well, it came to me in a dream. So clearly she must exist and have some magical power.)
This tumblr has been designed as a step up from journaling incoherenelty in the (relative) privacy of my own hard drive. As the last several posts can attest, the topic I find easiest to write about is my cultural consumption. Even if I do a poor job of summarizing, reviewing, or stringing coherent thoughts together, there’s often quite a bit to say about any given book, story, thingmadoodle, or other work. Plus, it feels both worthy and available as a topic of discussion. I participate in the world, I react to it, I participate ever so slightly in the buzz of minds talking about whatever it is that collective human minds talk about, and you don’t have to hear me attempt to articulate my ex nihil thoughts on the existence of a demonstrably correct political ideology for the economic decision-making criteria in modern health care.
So, anyway, that’s as good an introduction as any. Yesterday, I saw Hidden Figures. It was very good, as everyone’s said. Well-done cinematically in a number of ways to show the discrimination these women faced. There’s a lot of agonizingly slow scenes, flustered running in heels, and significant looks and silences. To my eye, the parts that feel unrealistic are 1) the lack of slide rules – yes, there are other methods for calculation, but surely that was part of the foundation? 2) the quite advanced mission control computers, especially the tracking display. I mean, sure, radar was well-developed, and somewhat computerized, but it seems odd that there’s so much integrated communications before there’s even fortran in the computations and 3) the few scenes in which they do speak their minds about the conditions & treatment they endure seem considerably overdramatized. But yeah, still hella cool science (even if much of the math is off-screen), tough story of racism & sexism & humans being shitty, and getting to the stars anyway.
And yeah. Organizing social things is tough -- so many humans to compromise with and choices to make -- but also satisfying.
About a year ago, I went to Drunk Feminist Films. It was a good time – a theatre full of people watching <movie about cheerleading whose name I forget>, getting drunk, and loudly calling out sexism & gender stereotyping & racism & rape culture & heteronormativity and other such things. Anyway, at this event there were buttons for sale, and I got some.
The button I got said “Feminist Illuminati”. There was a triangle eye pyramid and everything. The joke being that this is the secret cabal that runs the world, fucks shit up for men, and so on. Now, I never got any such invitation. But I did get this button.
And for a year since then, I wore it on my hoodie. It’s pretty small, doesn’t attract too much attention to itself, but a nice accessory that occasionally people would ask me about.
But, just today, I noticed I’ve lost it. It wasn’t on a very high quality pin, and I may have ran wearing it, or pulled it off by having my coat on top of my hoodie, or something. It’s not in any of the obvious places I thought to look, so it’s probably gone.
And that leaves me thinking: how do I want to do my activism? I’m pretty quiet in my convictions, and furthermore easily swayed by whatever arguments I hear recently on a given topic. I know this about myself. And yet. There are causes I believe in; feminism is one of them. Equality, access to health care, the rule of law, environmental protection, yada yada standard-issue leftism. (What, on tumblr? Shocking!!)
There’s more to it than that, as I hope there is for any thinking human being who isn’t a heavily-debated list of platitudes on a party platform, but since the purpose of the current post isn’t actually for me to fully articulate my political views, we’ll leave it at that. The point is there are some things I believe in. And there’s also my disposition/willingness to argue with random strangers/desire to work towards political aims. And while being generally quiet and reserved is fine, it’s dumb if that gets in the way of doing any thing for things I believe in. Though it’s also dumb if it burns my out and I’m adrift in a sea of ambiguity while loudly yelling at people who won’t listen and eroding my own capacity to do the things I would like in my life. A balance, of sorts.
Yes, I no longer have that button – a quiet but visible humorous statement of my beliefs. (On second thought, that button had too many adjectives and I’m glad to be rid of it.) But I still have those beliefs, and, particularly as US and global institutions groan under the weight of anger and hatred and ignorance and malice, it’s time to step up. Donate money to things, if not time. Yes, try to make good donations – research the recipients, demand accountability, build relationships – but don’t let this get in the way. And speak up, too, without a button to do it for you.
Today I just finished rereading Stardust. As always with re-reads – especially of good books – it’s interesting to see the differences between memory and reality, to pick up clues, and to see a bit of how the sausage is made.
In brief: I remembered there being more about the Sons of Stormhold – in particular I thought Primus made more of a play against Septimus, rather than simply evading him (out of paranoia); I caught a few more callbacks of Dunstan and Tristran’s stories being intertwined; I caught more of the sense of Lady Una as a far-reaching and deliberate plotter, rather than merely a character who turns up at the start and end. On the authorial side, I realized how few characters they really meet – including side characters – in Faerie; I realized how early it’s set up that Victoria is in love with Mister Monday; I realized how deliberate the plotting has to be for Tristran to leave Wall a few months before market-day, when it might have been more natural for him to leave at the market.
It’s still frustrating how little agency the female characters have. And this is a bit odd because they do some things that might resemble agency – Yvaine runs away, and Victoria gets engaged to Mr Monday. But Yvaine only runs once Tristran has freed her, and he mopes about it and feels bad and consoles himself that “it would have happened anyway”, while getting magical help to follow closely along her trail. Whereupon he saves her from the Lilim’s murder attempt, and the unicorn helps much more than she does. After that, on the flying ship and subsequent trek to Wall, it’s back to the old plot arc of her being dragged back as a prize.
I also went and looked a bit at Neil Gaiman’s personal life and history. I was surprised to see Susanna Clarke listed in the acknowledgements, since Stardust was 1999 and her stories were (for the most part) published quite a bit later. I think of Stardust as fairly early Gaiman, but he’d already done American Gods, Coraline, and Neverwhere, in addition to Good Omens and all the comics/graphic novels, so it really wasn’t that early. Much of his subsequent career has been taken up by being famous, I think.
A final note: I was reading the last part of the book before and after class this morning, so it was definitely eating into my work day. That’s something I’d like to avoid. However, given that it happened (and while I can work on having it happen less, I think it still will), I can hope to make the most of it, and of the rest of my time. That means I should have written this immediately afterwards, rather than distractedly having it bounce around my head as part of the cocktail of avoiding working. Because while I would like to make something of fiction, which includes reading & rereading & reviewing & writing, I’d also like to make something of grad school.
On the window of the room where the university keeps me, it says “Please don’t feed the grad students”. Now, why would we keep part of it deliberately crossed out, instead of just erasing it? Well, for one, “Don’t feed the X” is a familiar expression. For two, a different-coloured marker crossing out the “official” signage gives the impression of the poor starving grad students making a plea for food, if not freedom. It’s a similar thing going on when we say, for example, “Trump Putin denies ties with Putin”, and loads of other contexts, some of them serious.
And really, strikethrough is the most linguistically interesting basic formatting option. Bold, italics, underline, caps lock, font size, *dramatic punctuation*: these mainly serve to add emphasis. Sure, there’s different kinds of emphasis, and the variety of emphases have different connotations. But strikethrough adds something else: time.
What strikethrough does is it shows the edit history of your document. This is often humorous, especially in an internet context – showing slips of the tongue, rejected “first drafts”, fake censorship, and so on. It’s also very useful in many serious contexts: amendments to the agenda of a board meeting, or editors showing what they’ve done.
This changes the text from something fixed to being an evolving document. Generally editing (or censorship) is by definition behind the scenes, so that the final reader doesn’t see any of it. But strikethrough brings it to the fore, and explicitly shows how the text has (or could have) evolved. It’s more honest with readers about the writing process, and the fact that language changes over time – on a scale from individual documents to, implicitly, language as a whole.
While I might like to, I don’t think it’s quite fair to say this adds an extra dimension to text. If it is another dimension, it’s awfully sparse, with just only two points in time: past and present. There’s nothing near the richness that we have with verb tenses: perfect, imperfect, present, future, pluperfect, future perfect...and even if someone created a whole library of different strikethrough effects to represent these options, we probably wouldn’t use them as intended. So we’d have to cross it out and start all over again.
The author is Susanna Clark. Its pretty clearly influenced by Gaiman and Austen, and that already should tell you quite a bit about it. A fun read, with lots of gender, magic, and Old-timey England. Stories I remember, in order:
- MASSIVE SPOILERS!
- Three young women in a small town discuss men, marriage, and, covertly, magic. An unsavoury distant relative shows up intent on marriage, and the most powerful magician in the land comes for a visit. Can he save him from their vengeance? (Spoiler: no.)
- The Duke’s favourite horse goes beyond the Wall, and he bravely & foolishly chases him, and sees his future in a woman’s embroidery. He escapes, but has been somewhat flattened
- A poor woman marries a wealthy man, but dreads having to keep her promise of spinning five skeins of flax. She knows she needs faerie help; fortunately, her husband is surrounded by scholars of divers kinds
- A clergyman takes up a new remote posting, but finds the women of the town preyed upon by a faerie lord. His diary notes his entirely humble efforts to save the young daughters of his wealthy patron from a similar fate.
- A faerie prince and a jewish doctor, following an argument over the former’s cruel banishment of his granddaughters, and are waylaid by a man in want of a bridge. The doctor’s patient dies in the interim, but the lady reveals their difficulties in conceiving a child, and a rather nifty solution to all issues is found.
- Mary, Queen of Scots, gets captured by her dear cousin Elizabeth after a minor misunderstanding over plotting usurpation. She is confined to a castle with a woman whose embroidery works wonders. Can she use this to get back at her dear cousin? (Spoiler: Betteridge’s law).
Apparently there are eight stories in all, so I’m forgetting two, which is not bad. As far as “review” goes, there are a number of occasions that are about the subtlety of all of these ladies, but it’s really not very subtle at all, especially if you have any awareness at all of the trope of feigned meekness. So to some extent it may fall flat, but I found the effect is more cheeky and comedic. This trope is pretty fun, and something I’d like to write, so it may be a good source to mine as a lesson, too.
I would recommend this book. If you just want to read about it, Wikipedia has a more comprehensive review, as do other places on the Internets.
Unsurprisingly, this question offers a glimpse at the shocking mundanity of my current life. What do I look forward to? There’s no single event that captivates me and draws me forwards.
There are a bunch of things that I like, for one reason or another.
I look forward to choir rehearsals on Friday evenings. Singing with other people is pretty great, on a physical and emotional level. And it’s nice when it’s relatively simple and casual.
Not every week, but I sometimes look forward to my weekly meetings with my supervisors. It’s often stressful, especially when I haven’t done anything, and Chris often applies pressure to me in directions that aren’t what I have been considering. But it’s also a good time to get feedback and present the work I have done. Though mainly, I look forward to those meetings being over, and enjoying having a weight off my head for the rest of the day.
Increasingly, I look forward to the informal Tuesday lunchtime math talks. These are quick survey talks by gad students from rotating departments, and it’s usually a good place to see neat math, brush up on some skills, and connect to the rest of the department.
I look forward to seeing people and acting out shenanigans at weekly gaming sessions, but that’s sometimes tinged with stress and a bit of impatience as we muddle our way through the fantasy world of our creation.
I look forward to new chapters coming out of the various web fiction I read. Kind of a little thing but can be quite addictive, especially when I’m procrastinating.
It’s also interesting to see what’s not on this list: namely, I don’t particularly look forward to the weekend. I mean, it’s nice, I often do fun things or at least relax, but I also often do work, and it’s not vastly different than the rest of the week. More to the point, I’m thankful that I have a job where I don’t feel trapped in a cubicle, ticking away the minutes to the weekend.
Complete this thought: “I wish I had paid more attention when…”
(Number 7 or so, now. Not the same order as @obiebryce at all. And he’s now on Medium anyway.)
I wish I had paid more attention to my feelings. I wish I had paid more attention to the things I want in life and how to achieve them.
I wish I had paid more attention to things I was uncomfortable with or didn’t want to do, and spoke up. I wish I had paid attention to flagging motivation and apathy in my work.
I wish I had paid attention to advice I was given and could follow it in a meaningful way.
For a while, I used to think of myself as good at noticing things. This is a dangerous kind of statement, because it’s inevitably loaded with confirmation bias. Nonetheless, I think for a little while I deliberately practiced a certain kind of “noticing” and became fairly good at it.
This mainly consisted of noticing the natural world, or certain aspects of the built environment around me. For example, the presence of cats (glimpsed inside windows, etc), or the house numbers I was walking by. The types of plants or the colour and texture of woodchips in an area. The direction of the wind and the types of clouds.
This kind of observational skill was largely developed at camp, living in the outdoors for weeks on end, and through the influence of a certain kind of book. Or two types of books. First, there’s the brainy spy genre – there’s a lot of detective work or clever problem solving that comes in books such as Artemis Fowl, where “even a detail as seemingly insignificant as the number of steps in a staircase can be key in planning an attack”. For two, there were nature books. Foremost among these were, from one summer at camp, the books of Tom Brown Jr. This is really interesting, because he is most likely a giant fraud, among other issues. But though his books are likely more fiction than biography, the view of nature and of incredible sensory awareness they provided was enthralling.
I still think this is a fun and valuable skill. Artists practice it a lot, and I’d like to start sketching partly for that reason. But there are other ways of noticing. I ran a workshop about it once, and it was a great deal of fun. Which way do the colours in a rainbow go? What time is sunset at this time of year? Sunrise? Where is the nearest birch tree? Some of these also get into Fermi estimation – how many people would fit in that theatre we were just in? What’s its volume? Etymology is a fun one too. Does sophistication imply wisdom? Apparently it does.
As I said, I’d like to get back to this level of attention to my surroundings. But I’d also like to pay more attention to the social world.
I’ve never applied this same level of attention to the people around me, or to myself. To everyone’s desires, frustrations, means of self-expression, clothing choices, or anything else. This isn’t *necessarily* a problem, if what I’m doing with myself is satisfying and worth it and self-contained. But that’s so rarely the case, and humans live in a social world. And there are dimensions of joy expression and experience that only happen with other humans.
And perhaps, paying attention to that will help me pay attention to myself, and allow me to be less uncertain and miserable.
What is your favourite work of art? What do you love about it?
First, I’m going to whine about how arbitrary and unfair this question is. Then, I will consider avoiding answering it with various clever diversions, such as “I consider the whole universe a work of art”.
But then I’m going to pick Brahms string sextet no. 1. It’s such a rich texture, using six instruments to their fullest. Especially the two violas. It sweeps across the emotional spectrum, from flowing to piercingly energetic to deeply lyrical, and to emotions that do not have names. It’s difficult, and requires a lot of skill and coordination, as chamber music does.
Hearing this piece is a wonderful experience of sound, emotion, and time. (Playing it is too.) I’d recommend giving it a listen.
Give your city (or town or region) a new name that reflects what kind of place it is, and explain why you chose that name
(Writing prompt 5/300, more or less.)
Ok, this is a fun one. How many names can I come up with for Kitchener-Waterloo?
I’m going to ignore the prompt and for the most part choose not to explain anything, except when I’m feeling particularly smug or out on a limb. Warning: these will be terrible.
New Old Berlin.
Innovation City. Idea Origin. Silicon Valley North. Pale Alto. (There are a number of winter-bleached choral singers.)
Living Roomer. (Like Kitchener, but more laid back.)
Haldimand. Unceded Land City. Because this place, like so many places, has an ugly colonial history. I don’t know any names in indigenous languages, but those should be here.
Ring City. A city ringed by farmland, where ring theory is taught. And where lots of people get rings, both iron and wedding.
awKWward. It’s like KW won an award. Or it’s a ward containing KW. Pros: kinda clever and edgy. Cons: terrible.
But at least it’s better than all the other English words containing “kw”. (You can find those here.)
And my final contender: Topia.
Short & kind of pretty. And it’s not a utopia. Not a dystopia. Just a place in between, that is what we make it.
