Inkheart

An omake for the Inkheart movie:

Meggie: Give me your knife.
Basta: What?
[Meggie glares metaphorical daggers at Fenoglio.]
Meggie: Give me your knife; I'll kill him myself.

Those of you who've seen it know exactly where that should have gone — and oh, did he deserve it just then!

Ah, well. It wasn't that bad, I suppose. The Silvertongues* didn't seem to play by their own rules, though: the scriptwriter couldn't seem to make up his mind how much validity the local law-of-equivalent-exchange actually had. I suppose it still works if you assume they just don't have control at all what comes or goes, but this could have been clarified.

Also the ending rang a bit hollow in places. (To those of you who've read the book: I'm informed it's nothing like that.) And if you think about it, if Meggie can do consistently what she did then — well, you might just as well give her an armband and call her Suzumiya Haruhi.

Consensus seems to be to rate it not more than mediocre; but I still liked it overall, despite the places where it wore a bit thin. Perhaps it's just that I don't see many movies, but I do think it deserves better than that; on a scale of 1 to 1, I'd put it at a 1.

(The book probably is better, but I haven't read it yet.)

* Y'know, I realize 'silvertongue' has been a common enough epithet for, oh, at least hundreds of years, if not thousands: but I ca'n't have been the only person to think of Lyra Belacquer...

Sandwiches

A fragment of a conversation with my aunt, some time ago (paraphrased due to the vagaries of memory):
Her: "So, what constitutes bachelor food?"
Me: "Sandwiches, usually?"
Her: "Ahh. Bologna and cheese and saving money?"
Me: "... pepper turkey and salami with Havarti and freshly diced kalamata olives."

I like sandwiches. Anything is a step up from the weeks of instant ramen endured in college, of course — a memory which haunts me to this day, and a food I will never eat again save in the direst of circumstances. (In wariness of which, to be fair, I am keeping a worried eye on the headlines.) But sandwiches are easy to eat while you're doing something else, and they're quick to clean up after, and even for one such as myself who cannot abide lettuce nor tomato they admit of sufficient variation not to be quickly tiring.

I particularly like fish sandwiches, although those pretty much violate the quick-to-clean-up-after part, unless you're using lox or somesuch.

... actually that sounds good. I should get some lox. And some more Havarti. Or possibly Fontina?

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(Edit 2009-02-03: added lost period.)

A dream

So the Witch (possibly Jadis, possibly Xayide, possibly neither: but she was proud, and old, and powerful, and beautiful, and evil after the fairy-tale tradition) was cast into a dead world. (Not Charn, but similar.) The Witch raged that it would take a dozen lifetimes for her to learn the laws of this world well enough to escape; but an angel (< Gk. angelos, messenger: no wings, and in fact I think he looked more like a gnome) told her that she would not have that long, for she would be limited to a normal human lifespan here.

Apparently somehow I was stuck here with her — protected by my talisman, a curious yellow-and-blue pendant. She seemed to believe that with the talisman she could leave this world — I didn't actually have a problem with her getting free; I just didn't think she could do it, and when she failed I'd be short a talisman and completely at her (lack of) mercy. (And even if she could, then she probably wouldn't take me; I'd just be stuck here alone and probably still talismanless — also undesirable.)

At some point we were told, or read, that we needed to "unite the four entities with the hill": we knew that the "entities" were the four massive, graceful, humanoid colossi (red, green, blue and black, though not otherwise identical) who wandered the streets of the ruined city. The center of the city, where we were, was a towering castle on a hill. "Unite" was a bit of a puzzle, though.

(Note that despite my use of "we" above, there was really no implication that the Witch was in any way 'on my side', nor I on hers: we had strikingly similar but entirely separate goals. I wanted to get out, but I didn't care if the Witch did, and vice versa.)

So I went out to lure the blue colossus to the castle, made easier by the fact that at some point I became about his size. (Dream-logic — no transition, and in fact I'm not sure that I had a constant or even consistent size.) I did manage to lure him to the hill, but nothing special happened, and in fact once I got him there he knocked off the top three floors of the castle in a missed swipe at me.

I wondered whether this meant the Witch was dead, but then I woke up.

If I had my druthers (continued)

As far as I can tell, the primary purposes of software programming methodologies are a) to reduce wasted time and effort, and b) to increase the overall quality of the product. (These are not, of course, truly separate concerns, but eh.)

1. The management of resource consumption consumes resources.

Most (if not all) software programming methodologies also involve large quantities of out-of-band information. This requires:

• additional effort on the part of developers to produce and maintain this information;
• the purchase and/or development of additional software for the purpose of collecting and organizing it; and
  
• analysis (which can only rarely be entirely automated) of this information by management.
  

All of these involve the expenditure of further resources which could have otherwise gone to features and bugfixes. If the effort and money spent on these is greater than the savings they afford, it's clearly not a good idea: and for small projects, there will only ever be a finite amount of room for improvement in the areas that a methodology can improve.

2. You cannot squeeze blood from a stone, nor quality from a poor programmer.

If a programmer who writes poor code is made to follow a given methodology, this will not improve their code — they will simply also produce poor sideband documentation and explanation of their actions. The project I work on has required people to document their changes and addition to the codebase for at least the past five years. My predecessors' comments have nonetheless often ... failed to shed sufficient light on the workings of their code, to put it politely.

This is in no way an argument against keeping documentation and properly commenting code — it's just that I don't think very good documentation or comments (or code) are likely to be written by the sort of person who wouldn't comment their code even if it weren't required.

I recognize that this is an argument from personal incredulity.

If I had my druthers

If I had my druthers, which I never will, I would insist on one thing: that anyone who tries to insist that I use a fixed, formal process for developing software must first read the Tao Te Ching.

I have few if any Taoist leanings myself, mind. It's just that I don't trust a proponent of, well, anything to be running off of any logic beyond buzzwords and glossy pictures. If they can read the Tao Te Ching and still think that their process is a good idea, they're at least not likely to be running on appeal-to-authority.

I should admit: I do not work in large-scale software development. There are all of three programmers on the team, including me, and the application's primary users work in the same lab as we do, and this lends itself to what — were I given to buzzwords — I would refer to as a highly-adaptive iterative development process. (But I'm not, so I don't.)

I suppose my objections boil down to these:
1. The management of resource consumption consumes resources.
2. You cannot squeeze blood from a stone, nor quality from a poor programmer.

(TBC)

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(Also I figured out exactly what I was trying to do yesterday. It's actually easily doable!)

Notes on H. P. Lovecraft

This post has had various pieces removed, because a) it wasn't really very well done, and b) the inside of H. P. Lovecraft's head is a very creepy place.

No, I don't mean the blind mad gods and the infinite uncaring incomprehensible universe and the succession of tomatoes in the mirror. It's been eighty-odd years. We're used to that.

The thing about Lovecraft is that he was very much a believer in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, and racial purity as a virtue. His descriptions of ‘degenerate’ monstrous races actually echoed his personal sentiments concerning the ‘lesser’ (read: non-white) branches of Homo sapiens sapiens. Lovecraft's frequent allusions to ‘miscegenation’ and ‘mongrels’ in describing half-human offspring also parallel, in similar form, his personal beliefs concerning the mixing of the races. Two of his aforementioned tomatoes were half-human, and horrified to learn it.

Fortunately, Lovecraft's publishers would never have printed such things; we know about the depth and breadth of his racism mostly from his personal letters. Thus the Cthulhu Mythos as used today doesn't really have any connection to Lovecraft's view of his fellow man. Still, I'm pretty sure a lot of people have put -2 and -2 together, and fast-forwarded to something closer to the present day to write stories in which, say, Dagonism is consistently the sixth or seventh most common religion identified on the U.S. Census, and perhaps in which we have a cease-fire agreement with the Mi-Go and a few scattered K'n-yan expatriates as residents, and in which Lovecraft is not remembered as a writer of horror, but as an incendiary propagandist, if at all.

Which, admittedly, the interleaved italicized fragments in original post could have been. The problem is, they could also have been from some guy on the Internet in our world — and I am some guy on the Internet in our world. Just not that guy.

If I can rewrite it to remove that misreading, I'll repost it. If not, well, I won't.

I offer a horrible crossdisciplinary (heraldic, historical, mathematical, and vexillogical) pun that came to me on the way to work one morning.

Q: Why is the flag of Libya equal to the city of Istanbul?
A: Because it's a constant sinople!

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On a related note, I present also the following blazon, which is of course several kinds of broken — but isn't it worth it?

Sable, semy of stars silver, a Space Shuttle suspectant of the same [streaming a swash sanguine and] surmounting a sphere sinople and sapphire; and to sinister, a second sphere, smaller, Sol.

The swash sanguine specified in square brackets is supposed to be streaming behind the Shuttle as it travels in its notional orbit — vaguely like the Nike swash, if perhaps more symmetric; there are a number of examples of this sort of thing on actual Shuttle mission patches. (On any spaceflight program's patches, actually.) While the remainder of the blazon is clear (albeit painfully contrived), I'm not sure that I can reasonably expect the bracketed part to be comprehensible to anyone who hasn't seen the (so far, strictly hypothetical) device, or at least has a reflexive familiarity with spaceflight mission badges.

(... why, yes, I did want to be an astronaut when I grew up. How could you tell? ^_^;)

Theremin variations

Right, so. As you may or may not be aware, the theremin is typically called, and with some justification, the only instrument that one does not touch to play.

This is not strictly true, however: one typically does touch the volume antenna to silence a theremin. If one is particularly good —



— one can generally avoid this; but note that even Ms. Kavina touches the volume antenna mid-performance while she adjusts a setting on her instrument.

Keeping that in mind, read this.

If someone does not hack one of those things into controlling a music source within a month of its release, I shall be very disappointed.

Admittedly, one would arguably still be touching the instrument — the headset is, after all, resting on one's head. Furthermore, unlike even the theremin, there would be no visible connection between the artist and the music produced: how could you tell the difference between a practiced, skillful performance of the instrument, and someone who has a headset on their head and is making funny faces while an external control signal plays the music instead?

... and I seem to have accidentally wandered into the realm of topicality. I apologize; I'll try to remain more divorced from reality in the future. ^_^;

The Astral Empire: Travel (part 3)

Not all astral skiffs are the tiny 8-square things described on p. 159 of the 4e MotP. Many larger vessels exist, although they are also generally slower and/or less maneuverable. (Many of the vehicles in Adventurer's Vault (pp. 18-19) are suitable; I suggest especially the chariots and greatship. DMs are also encouraged to find more interesting and/or flavorful names than skiff; I suggest cruisette, cutter, dory, fifie, flivver, junk, pirogue, schooner, trimaran, umiak, and vedette as starting points.) These are commonly used by merchants, and armed versions make up the bulk of the Navy.

Spelljammers, being expensive and powerful, are rare and restricted; legally they only exist as military vessels. Since the primary cost of the spelljammer is the helm, many of the Navy's spelljammers are carrier spelljammers (casobiac), which may transport up to 50 standard-sized astral gunboats (as skiffs, with armaments) or 100 lighter and smaller single-person aeolopters. As spelljammers, unlike skiffs, can enter dadh, carriers also (if rarely) see use bearing flotillas of airships into combat within a crystal sphere. The Navy also has a small number of dreadnought spelljammers in service.

Planar dromonds are completely unknown. This does not necessarily imply that they do not exist.

A common interview question — or at least it was five years ago — is to ask an alleged programmer and potential hire to write code to "shuffle a deck of cards".

The GNU C library, simply because it can, has the strfry(3) function.

I would explain further, but anyone not capable of synthesizing these two things without further explanation should probably not be trying to get a job as a programmer.

(Note to interviewers: your response should probably be along the lines of "Cool. Now implement strfry, so you can build this with straight bog-standard C/C++." Bonus points, on the other hand, if they define it on the spot, using appropriate #ifdefs.)

This function has no relationship whatsoever to the strfry(3D) function, which differs from strfry(3) in several respects; the two cannot be easily confused, since: a) they have distinct and incompatible type signatures, b) they are for different C libraries (glibc versus System V), and c) the latter is, thankfully, entirely fictional.

(Contrariwise, this function is related to the memfrob(3) function, on the grounds that, while they may have distinct purposes, they exist for exactly the same reason.)

Notepad

How to make Notepad use 100% of your CPU time for entirely too long:

1. Open this file [external link to 45,647 bytes of what appears to be broken UTF-16] in your browser, as ISO-8859-1.
2. Select all the text.
3. Open Notepad.
4. Paste the text into Notepad.
5. Select and copy any of the tens of thousands of little black squares.
6. Hit Ctrl+H (or select Edit → Replace... from the menu).
7. Paste the black square into the Find what: field.
8. Make sure the Replace with: field is empty.
9. Hit Ctrl+A (or click Replace All).
10. Go make a cup of coffee.

Tested on Windows 2000 with a years-old machine, so yours will probably run, oh, maybe even twice as fast.

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the limiting factor is actually "waiting for screen refreshes", since search-and-replace is displayed in realtime. Then again, I typically stress this poor single-core single-CPU box to the limit; I do have Firefox running with a thousand tabs open (modulo hyperbole), so it could just be millions of context swaps and page faults. (I would know for sure if Task Manager had been responding to input; but it wasn't, despite being at High priority.)

Chrono Trigger

Not so much the game, but the fan following.

Even today, almost fourteen years after its first release, the game has a strong following of original fans. Although technically it broke no new ground as a time travel story (all three installments of Back To The Future predated it, and as any reader of science-fiction will tell you, they were Johnny-come-latelies to the game themselves), it was nonetheless very well executed both as a story and as a game, with engaging gameplay, evocative and detailed settings, and compelling characters — even, or perhaps especially, the silent protagonist.

(There may just possibly be a bit of nostalgia speaking here.)

Anyway, the curious thing about Chrono Trigger is how many fan-projects there have been to make sequels, and how high-quality many of those games have been. We are not just talking about cheap ROM hacks here.


Chrono Resurrection, a fan-sequel (sadly, if understandably, cancelled by C&D letter).

In fact, never mind the games — the work put into the music alone is astonishing.

This isn't something you see done with most games, even the massively more popular ones like the Zelda series or Final Fantasy VII (Monty Oum notwithstanding).

This is probably at least partly because, unlike those latter, there have been no sequels to Chrono Trigger*; only a pair of ports for the PlayStation and DS (the latter more recently). But I wonder if there wasn't more to it than that; after all there are no (972s 25,204ch) shortage (500s 13,020h) of fans of the latter two, compared to the former (29s 729ch).

What is it about Chrono Trigger that attracted — and kept for years — the attention of programmers and artists (-yet-to-be, in some cases)? I would conjecture, but I really can't; it's been years since I played it last, and nostalgia would overwhelm objectivity anyway.

Anyone who can figure it out has a game to make. (Please.)

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* Chrono Cross was a nice game and all, but it didn't really have anything to do with Chrono Trigger.

Thoughts on a magic system.

The seven elements are divided into the four terrestrial (Earth, Fire, Water, and Air) and the three celestial (Light, Darkness, and Aether).

Like all natural living things, people consist of all four of the terrestrial elements, as well as trace amounts of the celestial ones. As such, it is possible to use any of the terrestrial elements to heal. In general, healing spells of a given element will be significantly more effective on people with an alignment toward that element.

(For a tabletop RPG only:) While it is possible to heal directly using the celestial elements, this is generally inefficient due to their scarcity in the human body — although a knowledgeable and skilled user of Aether could, e.g., teleport a poison out from one's veins, or a Darkness-mage lifedrain an illness.

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This could possibly have some interesting effects on game balance. Like D&D4e, everyone has some limited self-healing ability; one can also heal one's comrades if they are coelemental, but this leaves the party as a whole excessively vulnerable to the opposing element, which seems a nice potential balancing factor. Someone who is balanced is equally resistant to all forms of damaging elemental magic, but also to all forms of elemental healing. (See also: 3e warforged.)

The three celestial elements are really just there to have someplace to put the more interesting status-afflictions and utility magics; the ability to use them to mark particularly frightening attacks (a black-flame breath attack which does not char, but causes metal to fatigue, stone to crumble, and flesh to wither?) and plot-significant enemies (I needn't elaborate) is merely a pleasant side-effect.

Define "nearest."

This entry is based off of a livejournal prompt/meme. The text of the prompt is as follows:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open the book to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I wouldn't ordinarily bother with something like this, for relatively self-evident reasons, but as it happens, this was funny, because of all the trouble I had to go to to find a usable book.

The first book I saw was my Collins-Gem English-Russian/Russian-English Dictionary (ISBN 0-00-458665-4). This contains no sentences at all for several hundred pages.

The second book was a little tricker: closest by what metric? Closest to my hand? Closest to my fundament? Closest horizontally, ignoring vertical distance?

Well, closest at hand is probably the Wordsworth Concise German Dictionary (English-German, German-English) (ISBN 1-85326-330-3): it is much more comprehensive than the pocket Russian dictionary, and since the word catch appears as an entry on that page, there are a number of full example sentences scattered throughout; but finding the next seven would be an exercise in tedium greater than I have the patience to engage in.

The closest horizontally would be Elementary Classical Greek, Revised Edition (ISBN 0-8093-1795-8). Its page 56 is taken up mostly by tables of declensions of comparative and superlative adjectives, and it only has four actual sentences.

Closest to my fundament is a tie, I think, between Zork: The Cavern of Doom (ISBN 0-812-57985-2), and Colloquial Kansai Japanese (ISBN 0-8048-3723-6).

(At this point I should interject and confess that I have not actually cracked open Zork or Greek before today, and have gotten all of three or four pages into Kansai.)

So here is the relevant text from Kansai (starting slightly after the fifth sentence, since that would break into an example dialogue, and omitting the Japanese characters because I don't have a usable IDE right now):

However, unlike mōkarimakka, bochi-bochi is still used quite frequently in Kansai. It can be an effective neutral response to any embarrassing question you do not want to answer.

HIRAKATA: Ima no shigoto, susunden no?
IBARAGI: Mā, bochi-bochi ya na.
HIRAKATA: How's the project progressing?
IBARAGI: Moving along slowly.

HORIUCHI: Kansai-ben, mō nareta?
PALTER: Mā, bochi-bochi ya na.
HORIUCHI: Have you gotten used to the Kansai dialect yet?
PALTER: Getting there.

And Zork, which barely squeaks by in sentence count:

The warning explained that using a Frobozz Magic Compressor more than three times in one day can [sic] cause the machine's delicate magic circuits to overload. Sure enough, in the middle of producing a diamond, the compressor explodes. The resulting pyrotechnic display removes Bivotar, Juranda, and a good chunk of the coal mine.

THE END
Your score is 3 out of a possible 10 points. Well, you probably deserve another chance. Turn to page 54 and try again.

... which last bit implies that the book is probably at worst Tough (on the Zarfian scale).

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(Edit 2009-01-19: various bits of cleanup.)

Dream

So apparently I was reliving a portion of my life over and over again -- not in the Groundhog Day sense, but in the sense of restarting from a save point. (In fact, the dream took place on multiple reality-levels: resets were triggered by the me upstairs pressing the reset button on the PS2.)

Apparently I was supposed to be doing in particular — I was never clear on what, although I accomplished it on the third go-through, so I wasn't terribly worried — but got sidetracked by trying to keep someone from overpaying for a pizza delivery by using old, valuable U.S. currency (including an "1881 Lincoln quarter", which looked remarkably like a hybrid of the modern penny and quarter).

I kept resetting over and over again, trying to get to my room to come up with exact change and intercept the pizza guy as he delivered while still paying for my own pizza a moment before (or after, or not at all: it varied).

Eventually I woke up in a large room with all my previous reset-incarnations, none of whom looked like me. Apparently someone was angry because I hadn't been trying to do that thing I was supposed to do, whatever it was, and I was trying to explain that yes, I had, back in my third incarnation or so.

The Astral Empire: Commoners (part 3)

(Disclaimer: the Abh are ultimately the work of Hiroyuki Morioka. This informal adaptation to the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons deviates significantly from the original.)

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A serf (soss) usually becomes a citizen (laimh) through seven years' service in the Navy. They may or may not leave at any time after, but for those seven years they are considered serfs of the Navy proper.

Children of citizens are considered citizens themselves only if the parent chooses to formally recognize the child within the first year; under any other circumstance, the child is considered either a serf of their demesne of residence or an outlaw. (Specifically, by law and custom, merely provably being a child of a citizen is not sufficient.) Most lords charge child-citizens an adult-sized rent fee, in the hopes of driving someone into serfdom.

Occasionally, usually due to insane bravery or skill in battle, a citizen or serf will be Knighted; they and any children they designate become nobility proper, which may not be stripped away. (Note that any future descendants must be ritual-created Abh to be considered Knights.)

... as previously mentioned, Barons (and, often, Viscounts) typically badly want commoner residents of their demesne; at this point probably everything has been tried by someone at one time or another, with varying degrees of success and negative consequences. Yes, even that thing you thought of just now.

The Astral Empire: Commoners (part 2)

(Disclaimer: the Abh are ultimately the work of Hiroyuki Morioka. This informal adaptation to the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons deviates significantly from the original. In fact, more than half of this post is pulled from thin air.)

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To clarify, from last time: "self-government" includes any situation in which non-Abh rule over non-Abh, anywhere from a feudal monarchy (with the lord as king) to a Roman oligarchy (with the lord as Caesar) to an otherwise democratic republic (with the lord as President-for-Life). The most permissive it gets is probably analogous to the modern-day UK, where (if I understand correctly, which I probably don't), the Queen theoretically has broad legal powers but in practice has little effect on Parliament. In no case do any of these 'secondary' governments have any recognition in Imperial law other than as extensions of the will of the lord of the demesne (which requires the lord to intervene on their behalf to claim that recognition).

A serf (soss) also does have the right of residence: they may not be exiled. This is typically equally an obligation, as a serf does not have the right of travel.

Citizens (laimh) have other rights guaranteed to them: most notably, the right of departure — no lord may hold a citizen against his will for any reason, though she may banish him from her realm. A citizen does not have the right of residence; they must typically pay a yearly rent, in addition to any taxes. (Barons, who often have the greatest interest in gaining new residents, will typically have the lowest rents. A lord is under no inherent legal obligation to make the rent fair in any sense, however.) A citizen may pledge fealty to a lord, becoming a serf, in order to gain the right of residence.

In theory, a citizen also has the right of appeal to the Justices of the Kingdom; in practice this is not always very useful, as the law and the judges alike typically give Abh the benefit of the doubt over commoners. (They can be counted on to enforce written and witnessed contracts, however.)

A World, Inverted

This is probably completely geologically impossible.


Several of the features have also been questionably named: surely the Antarctic Ocean and the Green Sea? Older versions, still visible under the mobile-phone links, show even more questionable names: notably the United Ocean. (Although I almost prefer that to the bland North American Ocean: and Brazilian Ocean wins over the continental name hands down. Then again, I probably wouldn't think so if I were Canadian or Chilean.)

The national boundaries are also quite impossible, topologically speaking: count the borders trailing off to the left, then to the right. The Arctic borders are merely quite unlikely: they depict three borders meeting exactly at the Pole, which is at least vaguely plausible by treaty if the area is reasonably uninhabited.

(Of course, according to the compass rose near the Australian Sea, the names of the Atlantic and Pacific Kingdoms and the American Oceans are all mislabeled: North should be everywhere South, and conversely.)

It still looks interesting enough to explore.

(From Vlad Studio, via OK to Passenge, via RPG.net, by way of a bacon-cheese-log.)

(Tenne, semy of badgers proper?)

Sable, a mushroom (Russula recreans) capped copper, stemmed argent, and spotted vert.

(Hover here for actual program text consisting of massive abuse of barry and paly. In a real blazon, I would be abusing quarterly instead. I half suspect the grid-lines are caused by cumulative floating-point rounding error, but cannot be bothered to check.)

Russula recreans, common name 1-Up mushroom, is a class I (cumulative) antithanatic with mild psychoactive side effects. It is most commonly found in the wild in the temperate regions of Mycotia, where it is also grown commercially as a cash crop. Despite its structural similarity to Laccaria augens, the two are not particularly closely related.

Possession in the United States is technically illegal without a prescription or license under the Sery Amendment to the Controlled Substances Act, due to its use in the synthesis of a number of psychoactive drugs; however, this restriction is not generally enforced, and may not hold in court^{[citation needed]}.

... okay, as much fun as this is, I think I've driven this one into the ground by now.

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(Edit 2009-01-14: removed unsubtlety-links.)

More random blazons

... so yeah, I'm still distracted by heraldry, and am just going to post random blazons today. (Almost none of which could easily be rendered in pyBlazon without supplying extra charge-pictures, which I shan't do for now.)

Per fess azure and argent, issuant from chief a castle many-towered inverted argent. (Per fess azure and cendrée might be better, and then again, might be going too far.)

Tenne, fleury Or. (Here, as in the arms of France, fleury = semy-de-lys.)

Vert, two Bengal tigers proper enflamed Or addorsed and a chief sapinage sable.

Per fess azure and vert, the dexter half of a beech-tree argent issuant from sinister and in canton the Sun in her splendour.

Quarterly, 2. azure, 3. argent, 1 and 4. an image of the escutcheon as a whole with argent and azure counterchanged; overall, a bendlet gules. (Not a bendlet sinister gules; that would be too easy.)

Sable, a mounted and armored knight argent, charged with several pellets.

Azure, a pall or, and a painter painting on the pall three brown bears proper.

Bleu celeste, in pale an open book argent and a butterfly in flight or.

Tierced per pale argent, sable, and argent, in pale a torteau, a bezant, and a pomme. Alternately, Argent, on a pale sable two torteaux, a bezant, and a pomme.

The input to pyBlazon that generates that last shouldn't work; I don't understand why it does what it does, but it does it. (I'd like to file a bug, but I seem to have displeased the great god Google, who will not currently let me log in to Gmail, probably due to accidentally refusing his cookies. I will deal with this later.)

Heraldry

Heraldry has always interested me, at least distantly. I'm not an armiger myself — although I suppose could be: the British situation, where the possession and display of coats of arms is regulated, is apparently a bit odd, as historically assumption of arms was common even among non-nobility. Relevantly, the United States has no laws whatsoever concerning the assumption of arms (unless you register them as a trademark), so you're free to say "this is my coat of arms" and other people are equally free to tell you you're a pretentious git.

On the other hand, I am a pretentious git, so there.

Anyway, occasionally I have come up with arms that somehow amuse me, mostly of the ‘horrible pun’ or ‘obvious literary allusion’ variety. So here are a couple. (Images are provided courtesy of Mark E. Shoulson's pyBlazon.)

Ermine of gules and Or, a chief dancetty vert.
This one's interesting because it may or may not violate the Rule of Tincture. In the SCA, the field would usually be blazoned gules ermined Or, and would apparently be not be considered a fur, but rather equivalent to gules, semy of ermine-spots Or; even ermine itself is considered argent, semy of ermine-spots sable for RoT purposes. Outside the SCA, apparently, anything other than ermine, ermines, erminois, and pean are very, very rare, although Woodward (1896) does actually list a Van Leefvelt as bearing gules, semé of ermine-spots Or (no other charges), and Gough and Parker (1894) name a Deobody as having Or, a cross gules, semée of ermine spots argent. Both also cite some cases of ermine being used with metals, so a quasi-ermine used with a color is, perhaps, not beyond the pale; and the arms of Flower of Sussex (bottom of this page — ermine on erminois) or Davis (beginning Per bend sinister ermine and ermines, a lion rampant reguardant erminois...) are interesting as well.

The fact that it was actually rendered as sanguine ermined Or is probably not relevant.

Gyronny of 2048 argent and azure, a roundel gyronny of 1024 argent and azure charged with a roundel gyronny of 512 argent and azure charged with a roundel gyronny of 256 argent and azure charged with a roundel gyronny of 128 argent and azure charged with a roundel gyronny of 64 argent and azure charged with a roundel gyronny of 32 argent and azure charged with a roundel gyronny of 16 argent and azure charged with a roundel gyronny of 8 argent and azure.

Loosely inspired, in retrospect, by a particular Evil Blazon, although I originally got here trying to simulate orange with a high-density gyronny of gules and Or. (It doesn't work; the rasterization still leaves dots of the individual colors.) The appropriate motto to go with these arms would be, I suppose, "For its own sake." No herald in the world would accept it; no artist save a computer would draw it.

The Astral Empire: Commoners (part 1)

(Disclaimer: the Abh are ultimately the work of Hiroyuki Morioka. This informal adaptation to the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons deviates significantly from the original.)

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Commoners in the Empire are divided into citizens (laimh) and serfs (soss). Serfs are hereditarily beholden to the lord of their demesne, and have very few rights under Imperial law; citizens are beholden to none, save the royalty, and have a number of additional rights.

The nature of the life of a serf is dependent on their lord, who has almost absolute power over them. Some lords rule with an iron fist, while many others scarcely rule at all. In practice there is a limit to how poor the life of a serf may be, since the Empire guarantees to any serf the right to join the Astral Navy; if life under a lord is truly terrible, many will flee to military service and the promise of eventual citizenship.

(A surprising number of lords allow, or even set up, a subsidiary system of self-governance; this is occasionally out of ethical principle, but far more often on the principle that any given Abh would just as soon not be bothered with the details of actually making laws and judgements as long as the taxes come in. The fact that there are elected officials other people between the lord and many unpopular decisions also implies a ready collection of scapegoats in case of hard times.)

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(Edit 2009-01-14: Generalized somewhat.)

The Astral Empire: Nobility (part 2)

(Disclaimer: the Abh are ultimately the work of Hiroyuki Morioka. This adaptation to the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons deviates significantly from the original.)

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The Ablïarsec clan is the royal family of the Astral Empire. Only an Ablïarsec can be a King (larth) or the Emperor (speunaigh), and use of the name Ablïarsec is restricted.

A King is the ruler of one of the eight kingdoms that make up the Empire; as such, there are never but eight Kings at once. A King is a military commander as well as a civilian ruler; they rule over the nobility whose demesnes lie within their kingdom, and command the kingdom's fleet. They may ennoble citizens (laimh) freely, and subjects (soss) with their liege's permission (which is rarely denied, if ever); they may also grant demesnes to unlanded nobles. (This is a change from previous posts: the Imperial Demesne is no longer the sole source of entitlements.) The King (or Kingly authority) is generally responsible for interdemesne traffic (including the Merchant Fleet and antipiracy measures) and resolving interdemesnal or extrademesnal disputes.

The Emperor, on the other hand, is (as the name suggests) the supreme ruler of the entire Empire, the highest military and political rank alike. He or she is chosen by the eight Kings from those with the Ablïarsec name; a King may become Emperor (though this is rare), but must yield the Kingship to another Ablïarsec. The Emperor (or Imperial authority) also resolves intrakingdom disputes. In practice, except in times of war, the Emperor's power is usually less than that of a King — but declaring war is the Emperor's prerogative.

If an Ablïarsec is neither King nor Emperor, their children may not use the name Ablïarsec, and must instead take new gens-names.

The Astral Empire: History (part 2)

With the destruction of the Heavenly City's sphere, the Abh and illithids were both shaken: the illithids in fear, the Abh in horror. Many of the Abh leaders had been destroyed in the blast. However, others rose up to take their place — whether to see to it that the sacrifice of their kin was not in vain, or because they saw the opportunity to secure for themselves power and wealth, history cannot be trusted to have recorded.

The Abh-Illithid war was a relatively short affair, as illithid wars go. The Abh's asteroidal primary base of support, while small, remained untouched by the blast. Contrariwise, upon learning of the fate of the Heavenly City, many illithids in crystal spheres simply gathered whatever they could and fled to parts unknown, leaving behind a power vacuum swiftly filled by the Abh. The remaining illithids lacked the coordination and resources to form a strong counteroffense, and were besieged and destroyed one by one.

(The early Abh government was thus military rule, falling into place in the tyranny-shaped hole left by the illithids. This largely persists to the modern day: military service is expected of all nobility, and required to inherit or be granted a demesne. While the Abh themselves have no particular alignment leaning, their government is (in 3e terms) very much LE.)

The Astral Empire: History (part 1)

Some eight to nine thousand years ago (adjust to taste), there existed a giant illithid city, capital of a great illithid empire, built on and between ten thousand asteroids within a crystal sphere. The native sentient races of the sphere's worlds (primarily humans, though with many eladrin, elves, and drow) had long since been taken by the illithids as slaves, and crossbred and magically enhanced for various purposes: foremost among them intelligence, and thereby taste.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, their gluttony was their downfall. The illithids had taken the precaution of making them sterile, capable of reproducing only by means of the ritual magics that had been used to create them; but these magics eventually fell into the hands of the slaves themselves, and this enabled them to amass (in secret, far from the Heavenly City) the forces necessary to overthrow their illithid rulers.

Unfortunately, the Abh (as the hybrid race had come to call themselves) chose to do this by causing the City's sun to flare violently, destroying all life within the city. The loss of the largely innocent slaves within was seen as a sorrowful but acceptable loss. Most of the slaves within were to be evacuated beforehand; while this would necessitate tipping their hand to the illithids, the loss of the manufacturing and magical resources of the city (as well as the consequent demoralization of their illithid overlords) was judged sufficient. However, the flare was much, much stronger than expected: the city was melted, the refugees (mind-flayer and slave alike) were vaporized, the worlds within were scoured of life, and the crystal sphere itself was shattered. The only survivors were the Abh rear guard, positioned outside the sphere when it gave way.

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(Edit 2009-01-08: I need them to be more horrified at the result.)

Poetry

I always liked E. E. Cummings.

To be scathingly honest, I liked him before I read almost any of his poems, because it was the equivalent of “cool” in the uncool crowd I counted myself a part of: unusual enough to be “edgy” and old enough to be “classic”, so you could defend your choice to people who disliked either stodginess or modernity. (Why, yes, I was that shallow. High schoolers often are.)

Then I actually read his collected works.

Anyone who's actually studied poetry (which I wasn't at the time, though I have since somewhat become) knows better than to think E. E. Cummings' work is all free verse; his work has more structure than most casual mentions of his work give him credit for. Specifically, the man deserves acres of credit simply for writing sonnets that one can read without realizing that one has just read a sonnet.

Admittedly, having grown less Romantic (and less enamored of the Romantics) over time, I'm not so fond of much of his material and outlook — to the point where I have come to think "Listen, there's a hell of a good universe next door: let's go," is a much better phrase taken straight and out of context (as it so frequently is) than it is satirically, as Cummings meant it. I think perhaps I am exactly the sort of person Cummings thought of when he wrote the word manunkind — a technology-steeped reductionist, in less poetic terms. I don't really mind: he deplores me with such skill and flourish it's hard not to enjoy it.

Also I have recently read the moon looked into my window, which made me smile of itself: as usual, Cummings does it better than his successors.

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Totally unrelatedly: Learn you a Haskell for Great Good! I haven't actually read through it, mind, but the title alone is delightful. (Hmm. Possibly not unrelated, then.)

Still ill

(And I actually feel worse now than when I went to bed.)

Fever dreams

The clouds were still at war with us, so of course the lower decks were closed off; the club president had managed to schedule time in a couple of briefing rooms near Core, but half of us had never been there, so Mike and I were running around trying to find people to tell them where the showing would be. Every so often the PA would sound, playing tinny background music, and the occasional panel on the wall provided a countdown to the end of the world, putting some pressure on us to find people in time to start the showing so that it wouldn't be interrupted by the imminent eschaton.

The countdown was of course in dream-logic-time, so the end of the world never happened, but neither did the showing; somehow instead of being on board the ship we had stepped into Castle Dracula (identified as the Dawn of Sorrow version on the 'Welcome to' sign, although the geography didn't actually match), and were trying to convince the Alura Une to be relocated to the showing room so that the zombie administrators trying to get in and eat our brains wouldn't be able to.

I think her main objection was that we weren't showing any anime she liked, and she was trying to convince us to play a dorama by the name of 'School Penguin' (which apparently had nothing to do with schools or penguins); I was fine with this, but then somehow the president was there instead of Mike, and he got into an argument with her about how it was an anime showing and they didn't show other things anymore, and then she ate him and tried to assume the presidency; but under the succession by-laws of the club (which in-dream were called "rules of ascendancy" for some reason), this only entitled her to the position of treasurer, while everyone above that moved up in rank.

Then I woke up because my phone was ringing.

Illness

See, that "in case of illness" clause was there for a reason. This post is actually backdated; I spent most of the day in bed. I may have to miss work Monday.

(And I got a flu shot, too...)

The Astral Empire: The Abh (take 2, part 3?)

So Force Majeure is probably overpowered or underpowered, but there are enough tweaks that could be made to it to balance it out, I think; so a bit of playtesting would suffice to turn it into a usable 4e power, and sans playtesting, well, there's not really much analysis that can be done.

The problem is, it's a psion's power, not necessarily an Abh's. I didn't mention the gith last time, although I should have, since they're at least half the reason I associate the Astral and psionics. (In fact, if you want to make this setting totally Core-fluff-compatible, you could just swap out the word 'Abh' for the word 'githyanki' and use the arguably-noncontradictory hopefully-upcoming History segment.)

Except for the froch, which is hard to model usefully in D&D, Abh aren't all that physically special; in source, they're socially special, this only partially due to long lifespans. Perhaps this should just be peeled away, letting them have essentially the racial qualities of Humans, on the theory that they're of human stock anyway....

... I should just move on to the History segment mentioned above, and make it crunch-free. I'll come back to the rules-instantiation of the fluff later.

Anime, mixed drinks, and Internet archaeology

(Disclaimer: I don't drink. I was just ... very distracted.)

So a few of you may know that there are, in most mixed-drinks databases, entries entitled Sailor Moon, Sailor Mercury, and Sailor Venus. Yes, this includes those handheld electronic drink databases. (Those of you who didn't know this, well, now you can possibly win a sucker bet or two.) These are also the only widely accepted anime-based mixed drinks I've ever heard of; every so often you see people inventing them, but these have never caught on. (Incidentally, I'm particularly fond of the Ranma one there: a Whisky and a Brandy in seperate[sic] glasses, alternate between them.)

Those of you who have even a passing familiarity with the show or the manga might ask: where are Sailors Mars and Jupiter? Why are they not represented in the lineup, in any database?

In order: here, and because Dita isn't generally known outside Japan. (Although see below.) This is almost certainly the original site, despite not being properly credited anywhere: Wayback confirms its existence at least since 1999, which I think predates these databases by three or four years. (The page source also claims a 1998 origin.)

I reproduce the recipes here for completeness' sake.

Sailor Mars (original):

• Red wine (120 mL)
• Dita (20 mL)
• Peachtree (20 mL)
• Cranberry juice (30 mL)

Shake well; serve in a red-wine glass, garnished with a fresh strawberry.

This is the original version, dating from 1998-09-13, superseded only a year or so ago (between 2006-09-25 and 2007-06-02). The use of Dita, which most drinks databases don't seem to recognize, doubtless prevented its inclusion.

Sailor Mars (updated):

• Akvavit (40 mL)
• Cointreau (20 mL)
• Lemon juice (15 mL)
• Cranberry juice (60 mL)

Shake well; serve in a cocktail glass, garnished with a red rose.

This one, on the other hand, contains only commonly known ingredients, and might make it into the databases yet. (What on earth is that "rose" supposed to be? An actual rosebud?)

Sailor Jupiter:

• Green Tea Liqueur (45 mL)
• Vodka (30 mL)
• Dita (15 mL)

Shake well; serve in a cocktail glass, garnished with a mint leaf.

This one has been unchanged since its introduction, although with the relatively recent release (2005) of Dita Starburst (which is labeled in green), I wonder...

But anyway. Dita is a lychee liqueur made by Pernod, and also sold under the name Soho in France (its country of origin): as of 2006 September, it is also sold on this side of the pond, so you may be able to try out a Sailor Mars (new or old version) without special-ordering anything. (Now all you have to do is find green tea liqueur somewhere: although Suntory makes both Zen and the variety depicted in the photograph on the original page, it seems Zen is notably sweeter, so you may or may not want to substitute.)

(Happy new year, everyone; and may you remember this year fondly and well when it, too, has become auld lang syne.)