The Handsome Grackle ... or, Spring is sprung and I missed it!

(Following to be read with some strange accent in mind - I have no idea why, just cause...)
Please being 'Hello!' to my good friend, the Handsome Grackle.
(Cease with accent, please.)

He is what is called nadderer - a sea-nicker, a water-dwelling monster - with neither head nor tail, but both at once, being able to walk on either end when he/she/it ventures on land. A very very robust creature, it recovers quickly from hurts, so much so that he has been swallowed more than once by much larger sea-beasts, travelled the length of their alimentary canals before being "poo-ed" (if I may use that word...) out again, relatively unharmed to get about his/her/its business. Oh what fun...

There have been many excellent questions put to me here over the last couple of posts. Unfortunately I do not have time right now to address many of them - but I hope a couple of answers might suffice for the mo...?

Portals was wondering, "I have questions about lahzars' weapons. Is a fulgar's fuse used as a kind of spear, or more like a lightsaber from Star Wars? Do wits have any kind of weapon that they use? Thanks"

A fuse is used more as a quarterstaff than anything else, a way to extend reach (though with a the wire wrapped about a pole of cane or wood I am actually not so sure a magnetic field would occur as has been suggested elsewhere - sorry whoever posted, I thought the wire needed to be coiled about metal to achieve this - but please correct me if I am wrong, physics at high school was my weakness).

Wits would generally see it as being beneath them to resort to weapons, the control and manipulation of frission is everything to them. Saying that a pure wit would probably look down on a bane, and in turn a bane would probably see a purist wit as lacking versatility.

Another question was regarding the status of the Gottlands, which are in fact not a part of the Haacobin Empire but an empire to itself - a hegemony of kingdoms, duchies and the like allied and treatied to the Sigismundian dynasty that currently rules the Gottskylds. They are protected from the Haacobins by the great big threwdish swamp of the Ichormeer, though battles have been fought between the two giants, with little gain for either side. The Haacobins regard the Sigismunds with sullen respect.

I shall get to the problem of lamps as soon as I might, honest - time is really crimping me now...

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Name-dropping in American Philosophical Society's Publication

Reader Bryan points me to the latest issue of American Philosophical Society's publication, where this humble little site was mentioned on page 54.

The main article is titled "How Maya Hieroglyphs Got Their Name: Egypt, Mexico, and China in Western Grammatology since the Fifteenth Century" by Byron Ellsworth Hamann from
Department of Anthropology and Department of History, The University of Chicago.


http://www.aps-pub.com/proceedings/1521/1520101.pdf

The illustration shown above had this caption:

Car ornamentation with “Chinese” characters, photographed in Almería, Spain, in August 2006. The third character from the left is dao (“way” or “path”); the rest are nonsensical (or, as James Mathien put it, “Fakenese”). Mayanists might refer to these as “pseudo-glyphs.” Photograph by the author [Hamann].

The article is sixty-eight pages long, so be patient or get a few liters of beer in you before proceeding.

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This is cool...Wing

My fren dhivager's tattoo.

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"Lotus"

Every time I see signs for Sierra Mist, I laugh. It is because "mist" in German slang means "[something] with terrible quality".


http://www.bmezine.com/tattoo/A80804/high/n2j8-lotus.jpg

This person probably think his/er tattooed 荷 means "lotus", but that depends how it is read.

In Japanese, it means "burden".

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Sinful

I was showing a visiting friend parts of northern Arizona over the weekend, when we encountered this young lady at Sedona.



She probably has no clue what the three characters 猛威勝 on her t-shirt meant, nor the fact there are mirrored.

Update: August 24, 2008 - Reader BH pointed out that Sinful is a brand of women apparel & this particular shirt is available for US$40.

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A post at last! (Would you believe it?)

So much commenting goodness with the last post! I was going to respond there but thought maybe it might work just as well here... (given I am feeling a tad stuck with post ideas right now because a certain 3rd book has most of my attention).

Amongst all the excellent ideas batted forth and back I wanted to answer two things:

Firstly, to fulgars using swords: well, the idea is feasible - it has certainly crossed my addled thoughts (especially the reverse, ie. the dangers of using a metal weapon against a fulgar). The conclusion I am running with is that most fulgars would regard to use of a sword as some kind of admission of weakness - that their ability with their eclatics is not quite up to rigours of the stouche. It also strikes me that the more sword using pugnators (sagaars, sabrine adepts) might look a little darkly on such a practice - a kind of "demarcation dispute", that's our technique! Get your own! - and in return a fulgar would never stoop to admitting that another profession's technique might be worthy of use... Note that I say most, not all... I am trying not to be painful, but, you know, I have been thinking about how the H-C works for a little while now...

As to wire-swords (barbed or otherwise) well there is a concept though aforementioned demarcation would still be a problem here, and as far as "charged" bullets go, well the nature of electricity is that once the source of the current is no longer present then there is no current = once the ball had left the firelock it would no longer be charged (am I being annoying yet?) Having said that, it certainly is a snazzy idea, though I reckon you've got to allow pistoleers and scourges and the like their own specialty.

This leads rather niftily into my second topic of choice, technicality v fastasticality (is that even a word?). Some rules from our own world are fun to break (we cannot even do with all our technology what the transmogrifers do with lahzars or the masacaars with gudgeons), others I like to adhere to (certain laws of physics, for example). What I think makes for good ideation is not the consistency with our own world but the internal consistency of all the ideas together. Unfortunately I am no genius so I live in a fairly continuous concern that I am not being as internally consistent as I could be with the H-c - but I do try. Probably my main guiding factor is feel - does this idea feel like it could work? Does if feel right? Does it fit the feel of the H-c overall?

Part of that feel is the sense (I hope) of plausibility within the construct of the H-c itself. After years and years of laying down layers on layer of ideas I have begun to develop a kind of "box" of rules, a space - a vibe - in which it becomes easier to fashion ideas that fit well within the whole. This I reckon is the best thing to aim for (if world building is your thing of course) to take your time and let your ideas collect and meld and create their own distinct feel that is your own.

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FREE RICE - A worthy undertaking, surely.

Here is something worthy that Will has brought to my attention: Free Rice - a vocabulary guessing game where every word you get correct has the organisers donating 20 - yes 20! - grains of rice to the hungry and disadvantaged. Better still I suppose, is to help folks fend for themselves but they still need to eat in the meantime.

20 rice grains does not sound like much but it all adds up if you get into it, I found the challenge to my vocab very stimulating indeed and they give you a VOCAB LEVEL (a stat!) which for old role players who like numerical levels like me is a great incentive to keep getting words right (as if helping others was not...)

Does anyone here dare post up their best Vocab Level?

I hope folks can forgive me for going off topic in this way... and cheers very much to you all for the very stimulating discussions regarding the social status of teratologists.

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