The sky was feigning black, but could only manage a blustery grey, as if somewhere far along the paths of the sea, light fell and shone back along the miles onto this storm sky. The clouds milled slowly in shades of charcoal and slate, inking the stars out. The sea was fretting below, a sullen grey-blue, and rose swiftly and briefly under the little boat as if it was trying to slough her off.

In the boat a small figure sat, swaying imperturbably with the waves. The silhouette was accented with a venerable, stained canvas parasol, and between the glints of water running off its rim an occasional twinkle of black eyes emerged. The sea was shoving the dinghy towards an outcropping of rock, a black tumble topped with a more ordered tumble that was a tower, its top swathed in hissing steam from a wind-teased and much abused flame.

The boat neared the crouching rocks, and the little figure within stirred and stepped onto the bucking bench, waiting until doom was well and truly nigh before hopping into the air and drifting a few feet landward with the maelstrom under the parasol before falling awkwardly but safely on a particularly large and uncouth-looking rock.

The tower was tended by Brogg. Brogg had always tended the tower, and whether his bronze skin had once been bronze, and had weathered to the pores and wrinkles of skin, or had once been skin, and had weathered to the sheen and toughness of bronze, you may guess yourself, as I abstain. Brogg knew his job was frightfully important, and himself frightfully imposing, and for those reasons, in some order, no one ever bothered him, and he was glad they did not.

So when a rat-a-tat came from the door, Brogg did not rise from his chair. Rat-a-tat. He looked around. Rat-a-tat. Perhaps the sea was throwing pebbles at his tower. Rat-a-tat. Perhaps the stones were finally falling from the crumbling parapets up above. Rat-a-tat. Brogg looked at the door. Rat-a-tat. The sturdy oak did not shake, but Brogg was certain that someone was ratting and tatting his door. Perhaps it was the tower-builders. Brogg hastily shoved his very domestic reading material under a suitably nasty-looking stone. Rat-a-tat. Brogg brushed a biscuit crumb from his shining bronze muscles. Rat-a-tat. Brogg opened the door.

Brogg’s employers, or makers, had had two legs, two arms, and two eyes. In this much, the figure at the door was like the tower builders. The legs wore faded blue trousers and ended in very battered brown boots, the arms held a drenched wool cape out like bat-wings and brandished a waxed canvas parasol, and the eyes were black and gleaming.

Brogg forgot that he was important and imposing. “Who are you?”

The woman smiled, and the web of lines on her face deepened like creek beds in flood. “I am Isabella.”

“Why are you here?”

“I go where I like, and I do as I please, and you can’t say better than that.”

The Trireme →

Many of you are doubtless familiar with The Bruno Daily Times, by Christopher Baldwin, a very popular webcomic that chronicles in excellent pen-and-ink drawing the life of a young, artistic, depressed young woman named Bruno. Also, it depicts her friends, who are almost universally sparkling and interesting. Please note that for the current month, Bruno is absent, while the artist shows us his really darling and yet not over-saccharine strip for syndication, “Little Dee”.

Occasionally, I reread Bruno, as I reread all the better webcomics on my list, when I am bored and web-abled. In Bruno’s case, it is always interesting to experience the first jar of returning from her current, meandering but romantic and fairly easy-going personality to her college-years’ violently argumentative harridan. Christopher Baldwin is universally (I think) praised for having made such a realistic character, and it’s true. Although, if Bruno were my real-life friend, I am sorry to say, I probably would have killed either myself or her by now.

The disturbing thing is, that this time through, I am less exasperated with Bruno. She is depressed, you see, and mostly for theoretical reasons - she can’t enjoy something without her own philosophical permission to do so (Gross oversimplification, but I’m an audience, not a shrink). I have always pretty much felt like she ought to buck up and try to enjoy life without an abstract reason to do so (which she admits would be a better course). And now, at this point in my life, I understand the feeling a lot better. I’m comfortable - amazingly so. I have Matt, who makes me happy when I’m not working. I have money to buy my comic books, and other such nonsense. I have my own kitchen, friends, roleplaying games. I have a lot of things which make me happy. And yet, the feeling that I am failing, giving up, not realizing my potential, is so pervasive that I break down and cry about once a week (I think—I don’t keep track). This strip makes way too much sense to me these days.

But at the same time, while it’s depressing to empathize with Bruno, and while it’s depressing (but rewarding) to read a lot of Bruno at all, it’s also cheering me up. Because I have a stable relationship, and a lot of other advantages Bruno doesn’t have (including a stronger sense of self-worth, if it ever gets over this lingering head-cold). And my malaise is not going to linger on and on, because I am already making inroads against it. So in an odd way, sharing Bruno’s travails is making me feel really upbeat. I wonder whether that shows excellent optimism on my part, or just means I enjoy fictionalized accounts of others’ suffering….

Hi, my name is Felicity, and I’m addicted to shoes.

Hi, Felicity…

If I were really seeking therapy, I would tell you about my Grandmother, about how she had, before her aging feet and pragmatism protested, about two and a half closets full of shoes. I would tell you about her collection of glass and porcelain shoe knick-knacks, I would tell you about getting hand-me-down dress shoes as a child and the sweaty torment of half-price moon boots. But I am not seeking therapy. That would mean I wanted to STOP.

I love shoes. They’re transformative, in a way only shoes or a hat can be. They change you, not only how you look, but how you walk, and the level from which you see the world. Frivolous shoes let the world know you’re out for fun. Whimsical shoes to let the Man know he hasn’t got you down yet. Heavy stomper boots to let the chem exam know you take no prisoners. No one thinks you’re weird for wearing the same shoes a week in a row. You don’t have to wash them, just brush them when they get dirty and tuck them in at night.

All of this is only a flailing attempt to touch the true reason I love shoes—something I really don’t understand, deep down. All I know is that one pair is never enough. There is an infinity of pleasing shapes and ornaments, and I can never own enough of them. Even if I could, how could I own every shape in every color?

So as you might or might not have gathered (I try not to be a wet blanket on the site too much) I am a bit down of late. Hate my job, et cetera. So today, in between surreptitiously looking at job websites, I happened to get a yen to ogle some [http://www.faerye.net/img/articles/devon.jpg|image|Devon Rex kitties]. I started searching for catteries in Oregon that breed the wee elfish hypoallergenic wonders, and came across pages like this. At which point, all my troubles faded away and I sat drooling over large-eared Wunderkätzchen, absolutely 100% sure that if I only had a kitten, I would never be unhappy again.

All patently untrue, but briefly and beautifully comforting.

I used to read a fair bit of fantasy, but in recent years I’ve almost entirely stopped. I was struggling to explain why to Matt last night, but I think I’ve figured it out, at least partially.

A lot of fantasy books have interesting plot. Some have compelling characters, some have intriguing and original worlds, peoples, and magics. A very few have good, fresh writing. However, these elements, that make a fantasy book great, sometimes seem to be mutually exclusive. The fantasy novel sometimes seems to be a pound cake, but instead of being constructed according to the traditional method (a pound of each ingredient), all cake ingredients together can only total a pound. You finally find someone whose cultures and creatures are original and exciting, as opposed to redecorated elves and dwarves, and you find that the characters are wooden, the plot drags, and, to make a long story short, the baker didn’t add any sugar whatsoever.

Steven Brust, however, omits very little from his cake. The Book of Jhereg, a three-book collection pressed into my hands by Brustaholic Wonko, contains believable (almost oddly so) characters, a fascinating world and culture revolving around two different races, neither of whom has been stated to have pointy ears or a propensity for warhammers, a startling lack of clich&#233s. To add a wrinkle, the books are intended to be individually sufficient— he designed them to be clear and interesting read in any order and in any number.

The characters; the main character is Vladimir Taltos (tall-toesh), a Eastern (homo sapiens sapiens) assassin and minor crime boss with pretentious taste in wine, a sardonic wit, and a talent for getting himself into trouble. The main supporting actor is his familiar, a wisecracking flying lizard by the name of Loiosh. Vlad is startlingly real, and by that I mean not only that he speaks as you’d expect a person to speak, not a swashbuckling fantasy character, but that he seems like just a guy. In fact, as I read these books, I cannot help thinking, “If Wonko were a bad-ass assassin, this is what Wonko would be like.” And, in fact, Vlad approaches killing people much as Wonko approaches computer science—it’s something he’s good at, which people pay him for, but he doesn’t really like it particularly.

I don’t want to ruin much of the background of the books, which is seeded all over like Easter eggs, but Easterners (what you and I call human beings) are kind of an oppressed minority in this world—they live in the Dragaeran Empire, which consists of 17 Houses of Dragaerans, which correspond to different animal totems, personalities, purposes, and proclivities. They’re a bit like castes, since they aren’t meant to interbreed. Dragaerans are taller than humans, and longer-lived, but no pointy ears have as yet been mentioned. Vlad only assassinates Dragaerans, with whom he has issues (bein’ an oppressed minority and all) but he also has risen to a surprising rank within Dragaeran society, allowing us to meet characters in the “magical castle” walk of life as well as the “beaten up for gambling debts” one.

I didn’t make a very close study of the language of the books—whether one might call them “well-written” or “excellently written” or what have you. I would tentatively put them, therefore, at “well-written”. No clich&#233s to make you wince, and occasional very apt and evocative turns of phrase.

I would recommend these books to readers of Roger Zelazny (who, incidentally, liked them). The same mixture of the gritty and the sublime, the real and the fantastic, permeates these books as does his Amber series. If your time is limited, I would say the first book (Jhereg) in the volume is tied with the second (Yendi) for quality. The third book (Teckla) is, while interesting and compelling, rather frustrating and blue-making. Worth the read, but not quite as satisfying as the other two.

Bottom line: Fantasy both unusual and unusually good. Explores moral issues, nature of humanity, strategy, and wisecracks. Made me laugh like a ninny in airports. Occasionally depressing, but what isn’t? Jhereg: 8.5 out of 10. Yendi: 8.5 out of 10. Teckla: 6.5 out of 10. Please note I am very picky about books, and reserve the right to waffle.

From the makers of Part I

Lihan froze. The children still stared upwards, and a little one in the front row laughed at Lihan’s fearful grimace. He spared a moment to shoot the urchin a nasty look as he turned to scarper for the opposite door. He peeled around the Hearth at the center of the chamber, and saw two guards, swords sheathed, walking curiously towards him. As their eyes reflected his aura and comprehension dawned, Lihan hollered,” Projectile vomit!" and ran between them, admiring their bewildered faces in passing. “That went remarkably well,” he muttered breathlessly as he ran, coat-tails flapping and several quills falling to the marble floor, for the open portal.

He dashed out, blinking, into the glaring afternoon sunlight. There was a piebald horse with a liveried messenger holding its stirrup, whickering in the yard. “Excuse me!” he shouted, and leapt into the saddle, pinching the man’s fingers with his rather scuffed traveling boots. He pulled his heels in tightly, and the horse obliged with a gallop. He saw the guards in passing, and a posse of children, led by the redhead, emerging from the manse en masse. Brat. Then he was gone, through the closing gates and onto the roads, leaving a comet’s trail of evanescent glow behind him. Stars only knew where he could go from here. As he settled into the piebald’s loping pace, he shook his head. I had to use an escape plan. He shuddered.

Lihan had been born in the northeast corner of Creation, where the cold of the North met the forbidding trees of the East, and frost made the ground too hard for mud pies. His father was a fur-trapper, making his living off the dangerous but beautiful creatures that roamed the woods so close to the Wyld. His wife kept the home fires burning. They were young, as were all the families on the frontier. Everyone wanted to make a nest egg and get out quick — before the creatures got lucky or the dreadful Fae swept across the marches for a visit.

All the children of Woodsend were friendly, or at least civil. Their small numbers and the constant tension of their parents reduced their own troubles. Lihan had a sweet, lopsided smile and twinkling eyes, but was actually quite responsible, and therefore had to look after his little sister a great deal. Since she was not yet two, and mostly slept, he wiled away hours with pine needles or twigs, pine cones or chicken bones, building houses, castles, temples, fortresses, and towns, which little Ida, upon waking, would eye with gurgling delight and paw with disastrous consequences. He did not mind. There was always another growing behind his eyes.

Lihan was building a temple out of pine cones in the little bedroom they all shared. It was Autumn, and the smell of dead leaves wafted from the few summer greens the villagers had planted. Ida was sleeping on top of his parents’ big bed, her fringe sticking to her head with sweat despite winter’s touch on the air. He looked up to check the path for signs of his mother, who was washing at the creek, and he placed a pinecone badly. One whole side of the ziggurat disgorged pine cones like a volcano spewing forth boulders, and Lihan said a word he’d heard the fur traders say.

Crawling awkwardly in his heavy fall clothes, he pursued the last two cones under his parents’ low bed. He heard hoof beats! He squirmed mightily to get to the first cone. Maybe the traders had come! Or a messenger, or even a bard! He would just clean up his cones and go see. He was straining for the second cone, sneezing slightly, when he heard the first scream.

It was not a scream with words in it, or one in which you could recognize a certain person’s voice. It was fear, despair, loss, and agony given a common note and a common time. The sound did not fade, but stopped with a strangled suddenness — but by that time, there were other screams — screams with words, with people. They were under attack! The voices tried to move south, out of the village, but redoubled and returned.Surrounded, thought Lihan. He could do nothing about his mother. Suddenly, he thought of Ida, who would soon awaken at the noise and cry. Just as suddenly, as he turned to shimmy out of the tight space to get his sister, there were feet on the dusty plank floor of the cabin. He had never seen such feet before. The ankles were as thin as his mother’s wrists, and clear as the water in the brook before it reached the town. You could see veins of strange blood, silver and bronze, dancing through the diamond-clear flesh. The ankles led down into slippers, not boots, slippers that were made of gold that flexed and furred like velvet. They were beautiful and strange, enchanting yet viscerally wrong. He did not need to see the rest of the graceful invader to know that the Fae had come to Woodsend, and brought ravening Chaos with them.

To be continued…

Today I am wading through an endless stack of zip disks at work, mostly filled with people’s endless backups (‘cuz you know, saving OVER the PREVIOUS backup would be WRONG!) that are in many cases not even dated (but all from 2001 or earlier). In a surprising number of cases, there are no files whatsoever backed up on the zip disks. Instead, there are between 1 and 10 aliases or shortcuts to files that once existed on some computer or other. This is one of the most amusing silly computer mistakes I’ve seen in a while.

Share your tales of woe and whimsy! And if YOU are the perpetrator, don’t feel bad, we all do these things from time to time.

My boss used to host a science show on television, and I came across a file of funny letters he got when he was doing so. Here they are, complete with grammatical idiosyncracies (the spelling, shockingly enough, was quite good):

Why does a peanut butter and jelly sandwich always fall on the sticky side?
Lindsay, 4

How do you make a baby and where do they come from? I want to know do they come from salmon? because my mommy ate salmon and now she’s going to have baby.
Sincerely,
Kelly
P.S. My mom won’t tell me so she told me to write to you for you could answer it instead of her because she don’t know anything about how to have a baby’s she don’t know where baby’s come from I guess.

Is it true that sheep eat poison ivy? Could that be why wool is itchy?
Sam

What makes you want to suck your thumb? And what makes your teeth stick out? BUT I DON’T DO IT!

[and my personal favorite…]
The other day I asked my mother why she always had to clean the house. She told me that life was messy. I asked her why life was messy and she said that it was because of entropy.
Do you think that you could talk about entropy on [the show]? She said that I have to clean my room because of entropy, too. Maybe all of the kids who watch your program would clean up their rooms more if they knew about entropy.

I thought I’d try something a little different with this Exalted character backstory, as the length of the other ones made viewing them rather upsetting to the stomach (lurch! lurch!) and as I haven’t finished it. So this is a serial character backstory. This is the first ever male character I’ve created. I don’t know why, he just insists on being male. For general info on Exalted, see the first character I posted here.

Lihan Hawkhome

Lihan walked towards the Manse, pausing to touch the stone of the doorway, and tsking under his breath as his hand came away sooty. He dusted his hands and stepped into the building, anxiety and awe swimming in his belly. The anxiety he always felt upon entering a new place; the awe was for the place itself. “Lovely,” he sighed. The six or seven children who trailed behind him stared curiously. “Oh, hurry along, hurry along,” he said briskly, “I’ll meet you by the Hearth as soon as I’ve looked about a bit.”

Lihan paused by the steel-armored guards, leaning lazily against the doorframe, and peered back outside. This was an Air manse. There would have to be another door, this one’s equal, on the other side. Neither would ever be closed. If something went wrong, he would run for that opposite portal, and steal a horse if necessary — the House stables were that way. Not that a lecture on First Age architecture to a passel of Dynasts barely out of diapers held much potential for disaster, but Lihan, in spite of his staid and respectable life, always had an escape plan.

He studied the stone more closely, then traced the fine tile lines on the floor, chords of the great circle, back to the Hearth.” All right, now, children. Little redhead in the back! I doubt you’re meant to be putting chiblees in that boy’s hair. That’s right."

“Now, this manse is indeed a splendid one. You are lucky to be in the House that holds it. And you are lucky to be here on a clear day. In a moment, it will be noon, and the warmth of the sun will coax air spirits up to those lumens — holes — in the upper dome. It is a special time. If you are allowed to attune yourself to this Manse when you are grown, this moment will be an important part of the ritual.” He paused, and held his thin hands out for silence as the sun aligned overhead. A soft rushing sound, like someone stepping into bed, was followed by a sweet mellow whistling voice, joined in a moment by another and another, as the Air Manse sang under the sun.

The children’s faces, lit with noonlight, were full of awe. Doubtless, each imagined himself or herself grown, Aspected, splendid and bold, blessed by that spectral voice. Lihan Hawkhome smiled gently. It was good to see those little faces lit in love for this building – he had caught them young enough that they did not recoil from the marvel of the Manse because it came from the Sun. Perhaps they would not neglect and ignore this Manse, as their ancestors had. He had to keep them rapt, he thought, as the note faded into time.

“Now, while my studies, and the knowledge your House has shared with me, had told me about the wonders of the Singing Manse, there are things I couldn’t learn until I was here. For instance, now that I can see the building, I am convinced that this manse is the work of the Great Artificer, a mysterious architect from the First Age. We don’t know very much about the Great Artificer -” except that he was an ‘Unclean’ Anathema in love with a ’Blasphemer’. — “but we do know he was a very gifted man, responsible for several of the most renowned manses in the Realm — the Many Floating Gardens, where whole islands are suspended by living vines; the Still Place, where an attuned Dragon Blooded may form his thoughts out of the very earth. And there are rumours of still further wonders hidden in the Threshold — manses that would get up and walk on command, dragging their dragon-track with them; tombs that are invisible to those not of the House they hold…but a manse was not just curiosity or a dull temple. It was and still is, here, the heart of a city. And what cities…” and he told them, told them of what he’d learned — vast cities made of glass and walls that melted like ice at a secret command, and reappeared when called for — cities of vast creatures formed by coaxing living trees.

“There were towers built like reeds, that only swayed gently when the earth shook; there were canopies of flowing water that caught the rain and did not wet the heads below. There were messenger birds grown out of crystal that rang when the wind touched their wings. There were stones that held the scent of fresh flowers.” He had closed his eyes to the children’s gaze, and ignored that part of him that protested that he had not known some of these things a moment ago, which he now saw and felt and remembered.

“There were concert halls whose walls showed pictures flowing from the music, there were fountains where the spray formed the faces of heroes, there were houses of ice in desert climes, in the City there was an egg flight that became a sunburst at the first rays of dawn, a palace of rays that was a temple to the Unconquered…” he just now noticed that he was feeling unaccountably warm. He opened his eyes. “Sun…” he trailed off. Why were they looking at him thus? What had he been saying? And what…he gazed in bewilderment at the cityscape suspended in the air around him like dust-motes in sunbeams. It seemed to flow out of the warm glow about him and he realized that he remembered this place, this wonder, this coruscating metropolis. Even as he reached out to touch the dream, it vanished, and he saw the children’s faces clearly, decaying from wonder into fear.

“Anathema,” he heard the redhead whisper, and, as if started out of slumber, the guards reached for their swords.

To be continued…

Once I went to the store to buy toothpaste - an increasingly difficult task, though not as fraught with peril as seeking a normal toothbrush - and I spent at least ten minutes scrutinizing the shelves, looking for the familiar package—no shinies, no starburst, just a red and blue package. Finally, after I had prowled the shelves about six times, I started reading labels instead of looking for packages, and I found my simple toothpaste all dolled up in a sea blue starburst box. I had considered this possibility, and so had included “New packaging” banners in my search images. I grumbled as I picked up the froofy package (not labelled as new), bought it, and returned home.

When I opened the box, I was shocked to see a cheerful yellow banner across the tube itself advertising, “New Package, Same Great Product!” Urgh!