Proscription Drugs

I believe that we, as human beings, like to simplify things.

The truth is, we live in a complex world.  The laws of physics that we know about are far beyond what most of us can comprehend, and most physicists agree that we don’t know all of them yet.  The intricacies of the human body are no less baffling to all but the most learned biochemists and neurologists and geneticists, and, there again, there are still mysteries which counfound even them.  History is full of factual ambiguity; philosophy is full of moral ambiguity; literature is full of contextual ambiguity ... is it any wonder that we need to find a way to reduce things, simply to cope with living in the universe we find ourselves in?

Of course, the danger when simplifying is that we may oversimplify.  I’ve discussed before how we “know” that there is no black and white in the world, and yet stubbornly persist on perceiving most things in absolute terms such as “true” and “false.”  (In fact, you might even go far as to say our view of balance is itself a paradox.  But that’s straying too far afield from my point.)  Let’s take a field at random ... oh, let’s say ... English grammar.

How many of you out there know that it is wrong to split an infinitive?  Go on, raise your hands proudly and be counted.  You know the rules of grammar, right?  You were taught this stuff in school.  Splitting infinitives is just one of those things which is downwright wrong.

Of course, “right” and “wrong” would be just like “black” and “white” ... right?  And we know there’s no black and white in the world ... right?

Now let me ask you this: for those of you who didn’t raise your hand about the split infinitive being wrong, why not?  Did you trot out that chestnut about the English language contantly evolving?  Don’t get me wrong, that’s true, but what it implies is that splitting infinitives used to be wrong, but now it’s okay.  And I’m not sure I agree with that.

Wikipedia, of course, is pleased to present us with a history of the issue, and the executive precis is that not only is there no rule against splitting infinitives today, there never has been.  Some folks came along and said they didn’t like it, and gave some great examples of instances where it really is quite awful to do.  But somehow we took “here’s a technique which is often abused and needs to be carefully examined” and turned it into “never do this!”  We oversimplified.

What brought this to my mind today was reading an online post from someone (whom I greatly respect) who dismissed a suggested wording change because it used the passive voice.  And we all know that passive voice is wrong, don’t we?  After all, Microsoft Word marks it as a grammar error, so it must be wrong.  Except it’s not.  Passive voice isn’t wrong.  It can be used very poorly, I’ll grant you that ... but isn’t that true of practically any grammatical construction?

This one in particular dates to the classic Strunk & White.  They gave us all sorts of great advice on how to write more clearly.  Except that most of it was pretty bad advice, unfortunately.  And, if you’re not the sort of person who’s so inclined to click on perfectly good links that I drop into my blog posts, let me quote you the most important sentence of the article, at least as regards the proscription on passive voice: “Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses.”  That’s right folks: in the section of Strunk & White that tells you why you shouldn’t be using the passive voice, only 25% of their “bad examples” are even passive themselves.  And this is a book that many people regard as definitive, in terms of grammatical correctness!

But, regardless of the correctness of the examples, the point is that even Strunk & White don’t say “passive voice is wrong.”  They say “it should be avoided, wherever possible.”  If you want my opinion, even that’s too strong a statement, but let’s overlook that for now.  How did we get to the point where, in a discussion about what the best wording for something might be, the very thought of using a passive voice construction is dismissed with such casual prejudice?  Not even worthy of consideration?

In another discussion (same web site, different interlocutor, far less respect), someone chastised me for ending a sentence with a preposition.  I cheerfully responded with the quote, commonly attributed to Winston Churchill (although most likely apocryphally), that that was “nonsense up with which I would not put.”  The response, given in some distress, was that Churchill was known to suffer from “mental illness” (which is utterly irrelevant, of course, whether true or not), followed by a plea to “save the language.”

Seriously?

Ending a sentence with a preposition is not only incontrovertibly wrong, but so utterly wrong as to spell the doom of the English language as a whole?

No, unfortunately, it’s not even wrong at all.  This “rule” stems from a fellow named Robert Lowth, author of A Short Introduction to English Grammar, and, once again, even he doesn’t say “never do it.”  He says, in fact: “This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style.”  See?  Not “wrong.”  Just “sounds better the other way.”  In his opinion.  As a clergyman.  Who wrote “an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to” in a sentence about not ending things with prepositions.

I could even point you to several other lists of mythical grammatical rules such as these, as well as many others (don’t start a sentence with a conjunction, never use double negatives, etc), but the point is that, even when the proscription doesn’t reach the level of “rule,” we still can’t resist stating it as an absolute.

Let’s take the case of adverbs.  Mark Twain says “I am dead to adverbs ... they mean absolutely nothing to me.”  Graham Greene called them “beastly” and said they were “far more damaging to a writer than an adjective.”  Elmore Leonard has started a “War on Adverbs” and says “to use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin”; Stephen King apparently concurs when he notes that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs” and that by the time “you see them for the weeds they really are” it’s too late.  Because of these types of opinions, any number of web sites will tell you that you should never use adverbs or that you should ruthlessly expunge all of them from your prose.

Of course “never” is an adverb, as is “ruthlessly.”

For that matter, all four of the authors I quoted above, railing against adverbs, use adverbs themselves ... in fact, there are adverbs in all four quotes.  As with the proscription against the passive voice, the first problem with advising people to get rid of all their adverbs is that most people can’t identify them.  “Very” is an adverb, as is “always,” or “far,” or “sometimes,” or even “not.”  Imagine trying to write a piece of prose of any appreciable length without using the word “not.”  No doubt you could do it, as an exercise, but it would be painful, and your piece would most likely sound tortured in at least a couple of places.

Getting rid of all adverbs is such a patently ridiculous idea that some of the smarter know-it-alls have scaled back their advice.  “Not all the adverbs,” they hasten to clarify.  “Just the -ly ones.”  So, you know, just get rid of all those ”-ly” words.  Like, you know: friendly, silly, lovely, beastly, deathly.  Those sorts.

Except those are all adjectives.

Yes, that’s right: when J.K. Rowling was criticized for an overuse of adverbs, for the sin of putting one right there in the title of her final Harry Potter book, it was a bit of an embarrasment to realize that “Deathly” was actually an adjective, modifying the noun “Hallows.”  At least I hope that author had the good grace to be embarrassed over the faux pas.

In some cases the advice gets watered down to the point where people tell you to get rid of all your adverbs that end in -ly unless they make the sentence better.  But, at that point, the advice has little to do with adverbs, and should instead apply to every word in your prose.

Personally, I love adverbs.  Sure, overuse of them is bad.  Overuse of anything is bad: that’s built into the definition of “overuse.”  Blanket statements about expunging them (ruthlessly or not) are just moronic (even if they do come from one of my most treasured literary idols).

But, as always, it is our human nature to want to simplify the “rule” to make it easier to remember.  What’s simpler? “don’t overuse adverbs, or use them in cases where a stronger verb would serve the purpose equally well, or use them redundantly, or attach them too often to ‘he said’ tags”? or “don’t use adverbs”?  What’s easier to teach: “don’t split an infinitive when the number or quality of the words between the ‘to’ and the verb cause the infinitive itself to be weakened,” or “never split an infinitive”?  What’s the cleaner aphorism: “don’t use the passive voice when the agent is known and the active voice is stronger, unless you specifically want to de-emphasize the agent, but not merely as a means to avoid responsibility for the agent or to pretend that there is no agent at all” or “don’t use passive voice because MS Word underlines it in green”?

And so we take a complex but useful piece of advice and turn it into something simple and profoundly useless.  We take a reasoned approach that glories in balance (and occasionally even paradox) and make it black and white: do this, don’t do that.

It makes it much easier to be able to correct other people with all our mistaken impressions.

The Curse of Alexander Graham Bell

Talking on the phone has to be the worst form of business communication ever invented.

I know I’ve railed before about people not being to communicate via email, but today I want to approach it from the opposite side.  When people refuse to use email to answer your questions, how do they want to communicate?  Inevitably the answer is the phone.  And I just don’t understand it.  I really don’t.

I’ve got a vendor right now that I asked for some information about their product.  And he desperately wants to call me.  I mean, I can feel his drool coming over the wires, you know?  And I don’t know how many different ways I can explain to him that I don’t want his fucking phone call.  I don’t need to hear his cheery voice, and he ain’t gonna make me want to buy anything more than I already do if I could only hear his wonderful sales pitch.  I want information.  I want technical facts that I can study and digest, and then figure out what questions I have (if any).

If we have a phone conversation, we have to do it at a time that’s convenient for him.  Because my best working hours are after dark, that means it definitely won’t be convenient for me.

If we talk on the phone, I will have no record of the conversation.  I will have nothing to go back and reread (hell, nothing to read in the first place).  I will having nothing that I can revisit and understand better the second time, or think of new questions, or connect with something else I’ve read.

I will not have time to plan my questions and compose my thoughts.  I will have to think on the fly, and whatever I don’t think of, won’t get asked.  Unless we schedule yet another phone call.

If I do think of good questions, the best answers I can possibly receive are whatever he can deliver on the fly.  He doesn’t have any more time to ponder answers than I did to ponder the questions, and that means incomplete answers, evasive answers, or, at best, “let me get back to you on that” answers.  If he has to pass the question along to someone else, I have to wait for another phone call for the answer, and I don’t even get the benefit of seeing the third party’s email address as I would if he forwarded my question on to his tech department and CC’ed me.

God forbid he should have some sort of accent that would make it hard for me to understand him.  Some of the most frustrating business communications of my life have been on the phone trying to make heads or tails out a strange accent while trying not to sound like a prejudiced asshole.  I mean, I fully support every nationality and every language being involved in my industry, and I’m one of those crazy hippie liberals, so I rejoice in diversity.  But that doesn’t help me understand you if you’re new to my language.  And you know what?  Your accent is not a problem in your email.

And, what is possibly the worst thing of the whole sad, sorry situation is that there’s no upside at all.  Really, none.  If we can’t communicate via email because we absolutely must sit down in a conference room and waste everyone’s time talking face-to-face, that’s still annoying, but at least we can talk about making a personal connection.  I still say the value of being able to see your body language is marginal at best, or at least is easily balanced out by the extra precision and thought put into a written communique, but I can’t deny that there’s some value in being able to smile at you and shake your hand, even in the forever lost time of polite chitchat ... all that goes into you and I being able to see each other as real people, and being able to act like we’re friendly even though we both know we’ll never actually be friends.  Physical presence definitely has an upside.  But what’s personal about a phone call?  How is a disembodied voice a personal connection?  I gotta tell you: being able to hear your tone of voice doesn’t even begin to cover the disadvantages of not having your words in front of me to peruse again and again.

In fact, the whole tone of voice thing is often more of a disadvantage.  It means that I have to plaster a fake smile on my face and act nice.  (Yes, even though you can’t see me, you can tell whether I’m smiling or not.  You can hear a smile over the phone quite easily.)  In an email, I can curse your name and wish horrific evolutionary dead-ends on your family tree the whole time I’m composing wonderfully polite rhetoric with which to impress upon you my graciousness.  And, if it’s not polite enough the first time, I can delete it all and start over, and over again, until I get it just right.  On the phone, it’s much harder, and I only get one shot at it.

Overall, the phone is not just inefficient; it’s downright inferior.  And yet my vendors want to call me, and my boss wants me to call people, and my boss’s boss wants me to call people, and everyone’s ticked off at me when I express my preference for email.  It’s enough to make you think the world is out to get you.

Or at least tie you down and force you to talk on the phone.

Roleplaying After the Fall

My elder son has become fascinated with post-apocalyptic things.  This is primarily because of the purchase of Fallout: New Vegas, which enthralled him for several months.  Then there was Fallout 3.  Then, for his birthday, among the many other video games, Bioshock.

And, somewhere in the midst of that, he decided that he wanted to stop the fantasy roleplaying we had been doing (we play Pathfinder, which is an evolution of the grandaddy of roleplaying games, D&D) and start some post-apocalyptic roleplaying.  Which meant that I had to go on a world-wide search for a good PA RPG.  We settled on Darwin’s World, which is a pretty neat system, and all the books are available via PDF, which means that you can just download a new book when you need it instead of having to go to the gaming store and buy it.  Which is convenient (if expensive).

Pen-and-paper (PnP) RPGs (as opposed to RPG video games) are an old love of mine.  I got my first edition (1e) copy of D&D when I was quite young, although I had no one to play with.  That didn’t stop me from poring over the books again and again until I learned all the rules.  Later, when my brother was old enough to play, I took on the role of game master (GM) and ran my brother through many homemade dungeons.  Ah, the days of graph paper dungeon making.  You do all that stuff on computers nowadays.

It takes a lot of effort (and time) to put together a world for roleplaying.  When I was younger, time wasn’t a problem.  The older you get, the less time you have.  This is partially because you have to do silly things like work for a living, but it’s also because your time sense slows down as you get older, which in turn makes time appear to go by faster.  This is something we all intuitively understand, but it turns out there’s actually a biological reason for it.  I heard on some NPR show that, by the time you’re 25 years old, you’ve already experienced about three-quarters of the virtual time you’re going to get in your life.  Which is depressing, if you think about it.  I try not to think about it.

But it definitely means that it’s harder and harder to scrape together the time to plan all that stuff out, if you happen to be the GM.  And, when you’re roleplaying with your kids, you’re always the GM.  It’s fun, and I’ve always believed that RPGs are educational in many ways, so it’s definitely something that you want to encourage in your kids, especially if you have some experience in it yourself.  But it’s very time-consuming, so we don’t play as often as he’d like.  Or as often as I’d like, really.

PnP RPGs are not necessarily better than video game RPGs—they have advantages and disadvantages.  When you play a video game RPG, whatever system the game uses is programmed into it by its creators.  This is good, in the sense that you don’t have to think about it very much—hell, you don’t even really need to understand it, or at least not the internal mechanics of it.  With a PnP RPG, you need to know the mechanics pretty well.  Which is more of a learning curve (although learning all that stuff is part of why it’s educational: the biggest question that comes up when trying to teach your kids math is “when am I ever going to need to know this in real life?” and PnP RPGs provide an answer for many of the math concepts that inspire that question), but when you have to understand the system thoroughly, it means you get to adjust it.  If there’s something about the system you don’t like, you just change it.  Of course, you need to understand the consequences of changing it, and you have to make sure you don’t break anything, and then there’s even more sneaky educational opportunities.  But it all takes time.

If you don’t know much about PnP RPGs, I’ll take it slow for you.  The first thing you have to know is that almost all RPGs make use of polyhedral dice.  A four-sided die is called a d4, a 6-sided (which is the one you normally think of as a die if you don’t play RPGs) is a d6, and so on, up to the d20, which is the largest die size used by the original D&D.  D&D 1e used all the dice, more or less equally.  It required that you understand quite a bit about various probability distributions and bell curves and stuff like that: almost everything I know about statistics, I learned from D&D.  After a decade or so, they decided to update the system a bit and then we had 2e (that’s second edition, if you’re keeping up).  2e wasn’t a whole lot different from 1e, at least in terms of simplicity.

Of course, the whole time that D&D was going through 1e and 2e, the rest of the RPG world was coming up with new systems.  The folks over at Palladium came up with the system that eventually led to Rifts, Steve Jackson invented GURPS, there was the HERO system that was originally designed for Champions, and of course White Wolf made a splash with Storyteller, which debuted in Vampire: The Masquerade and ditched all the dice except the d10.  And there were countless others—these are just a few of the more popular ones I’ve played.  Many of these systems were easier to use than D&D.  After changing owners a couple of times, D&D was ready for a big system change, with 3e, which introduced d20.

The d20 system is now very popular, for several reasons which will probably have to wait for its own blog post.  One of the big ones is that it focuses on the d20 (hence its name) for almost all its rolls, which right there makes it easier to learn than all the previous editions.  Darwin’s World started as generic d20, graduated to d20 Modern, then branched out into Savage Worlds and True20 rulesets.  So now you can get Darwin’s World in any of 3 flavors.  But the d20 Modern version is the default, which means that, if you choose to use one of the other two, you have to do a fair amount of converting from one system to another.

So even if you didn’t follow any of what all that stuff actually means, you can see that there’s a lot of work involved.  We chose to use the True20 version, because it plays a bit faster than d20, especially for combat purposes, and combat is where my impatient young scion tends to get frustrated the most.  So it seemed like a good idea at the time to try to streamline that.  I didn’t realize how much on-the-fly conversion I was going to need to do.

So that’s what my weekend has involved.  Last weekend was his birthday, so of course we were scheduled to do some roleplaying, and then I came down with a vicious cold that kept me home most of this past week, and we postponed.  Now, trying to get caught up with work and chores and family errands, I’m also trying to get caught up on roleplaying duties.  I just wrote a program to convert a d20 Modern stat block (that’s a laundry list of what a roleplaying monster can do) to True20.  It isn’t perfect, of course, but at least it’s fast.  Hopefully I can tweak it a bit as we go on.  And our gaming session tonight involved a lot of “wait, where did we leave off again?” and not so much “here’s what happens now!” but it was still fun.  And hopefully we’re now in a better position to do some more PA roleplaying soon.

But I wonder how long this fascination will last.  It’s held on for a while now, so maybe it’s a keeper.  I wonder when the last time I watched Road Warrior with him was ... we should do that again.  And I’m sure there’s some good PA books that I should be introducing him to, but it was never my bag the way it is for him, so I’m a bit underfunded in the recommendations department there.  I discovered there’s a radio adaptation of the seminal classic A Canticle for Liebowitz available; perhaps I’ll point him at that.

And I’ll keep on working at getting this new system down.  He deserves to have as many great memories of roleplaying as a kid as I do.

Chapter 17

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Breen Lagoon

The water wasn’t brown any more.  Johnny thought that was weird, and then he thought how weird it was to think that all water that wasn’t brown was weird.  He’d been here too long.  At least he thought he had ... of course, really, he had no clue how long he’d been here at all.  He should ask Larissa.

Larissa was looking out over the water as well.  The straggly mist kept you from making out too many details far away, but you could see the water directly below the boat well enough, and it was blue.  A deep, clear blue, cool and inviting.  Johnny felt like he could see straight to the bottom, although he couldn’t actually make out any bottom.  Which only made him feel like the water must be very, very deep.  There was no sign of fish or any other aquatic life; all the floating plants were long gone and the “shore” they had crossed to get here was lost in the mist.  Larissa’s eyes seemed fixed on a rocky crag half hidden by the haze, ahead and to their left.  From the look in her eye, Johnny guessed she wasn’t really ready to talk about the passage of time (or lack thereof) in this strange place he had brought her.  It was a calculating, cataloguing look that seemed to be enumerating impossibilities and filing them away for later consideration.

Roger was back at the wheel.  She was guiding the ship slowly, partially because of the mist, Johnny supposed, but probably also because of the waves.  There had been no waves in the swamp, of course.  And Johnny wondered if an airboat, regardless of its impressive size and unusual qualities, was really the best craft for this particular journey.  He supposed it would have been impossible to get to this point in a ship with a large draft, but, if those waves got much bigger ...

Aidan was sitting in the bow of the ship, staff across his knees, head bowed.  He seemed exhausted by what he’d done to get them here.  Johnny squatted down beside him.  “That was very impressive,” Johnny said.

Aidan raised his head a bit and smiled a weak smile at Johnny.  “Thank you,” he replied.  “But I’m just a vessel.  Shallédanu lei shonta.”

Johnny nodded.  “So ... where are we now?”

Roger’s voice came out of nowhere, startling him.  “Breen Lagoon.  The place between places.”

Johnny looked up; Roger had come up behind him and stood over him, looking out over the misty water.  He noticed that the ship was now drifting on the waves, since no one was manning the wheel.  “The place between places?” he asked.

“A place between places,” Aidan corrected.

“Well, it’s the only one me da’ ever told me about,” Roger said.

Aidan tried on his weak grin again.  “Your da’ was a well-traveled man, Captain, but there are a few places left that he’s never seen.”

Roger snorted.  “If ye say so.  Well, whether it’s the only one there is or not, it’s the only one we could get to, I’m pretty sure o’ that.”  She waited for Aidan to correct her, and seemed satisfied when he made no attempt to do so.  “So here we are.  About to ram right into that there hunk o’ rock, unless our Guide here can get these waves under control.”  She looked at Aidan with some challenge in her eyes, but she offered her gloved hand to help him up.

Aidan accepted her offer and let her pull him forcibly to his feet.  He put out his staff to lean against; he still looked unsteady and weak.  Johnny rose as well; Larissa had sidled down the railing to join them at the front of the boat, where they could all see that The Slyph was indeed drifting straight for the jagged spur of rock that thrust above the still fairly gentle waves.  The rock was too small to be considered an island; it was probably no bigger around than a small house, although it towered perhaps fifty feet above the surface of the water.  Now that they could see it more clearly, they could tell that nothing grew on it, although it had a collection of seabirds perched in its various clefts.  Most prominent were huge, shaggy brown pelicans, which looked more like caricatures of pelicans than actual birds.  They were each as heavy as a person, easily, and their throat sacs hung as low as the bottoms of their broad chests.  There were black and white birds that Johnny thought looked like gigantic seagulls, but Larissa murmured “no, more like an albatross.”  And, in the very highest reaches, some of the soft gray birds with the feathered batwings, which were so far the only evidence Johnny had seen that there was any living species shared between swamp and lagoon.

Aidan took all this in, then looked right and left to see if there were any other upcoming crises he needed to be aware of.  Nothing but mist as far as the eye could see.  Turning back to the rock, he raised his staff once again, and began chanting in his strange liquid language.  His voice cracked a bit; suddenly Bones was there, uncharacteristically quiet, and upended a pitcher of water over Aidan’s head.  Instead of spluttering angrily, though, Aidan seemed to gain strength from being drenched, and his voice grew a bit stronger.  Suddenly the ship seemed to settle down into the water somehow, as if it had suddenly gained weight, or grown a significant portion of hull below the waterline.  It slowed its pace, and the waves now seemed to be breaking against the sides of the craft instead of carrying it along.  Roger turned around and hauled ass back to the stern, where Johnny heard the great fan start up.  Instead of moving the ship forward, she turned it, hard, and it spun slowly, until it was broadside to the rocky outcropping.  Gently it bumped up against the rough stone, which Johnny could now see was pitted and twisted so much it looked like coral.  Several of the birds fluttered in an ungainly fashion as the ship touched their perch, and two or three of the closer pelicans positively glared at them.

Roger reappeared, her hands on her hips and her pervasive smile returned.  “Just had to make sure we didn’t snap the sylph off The Sylph,” she said.  Johnny understood: if she hadn’t turned the ship, the figurehead might have gone into a hole or crevisse in the rocks and gotten severely damaged.

Bones was handing another pitcher to Aidan, who took a long draught before returning it.  “Thankee, Bones, you were very helpful there,” Aidan said.  Bones bobbed his head and clicked his beak, then scampered away.

Roger stepped up to the Water Guide.  “Good job, Aidan,” she said in a low voice.  “I thought ye weren’t up to the task for a mite.”

He didn’t return her smile.  “This isn’t an ordinary job,” he said.

She let her face grow serious for a moment.  “I know that, matey.  I appreciate ye takin’ it on.  ‘Specially not knowin’ where we’ll be fetchin’ up.”

“Oh, I think we both know where we’ll end up.”  Aidan looked directly into her eyes.

Roger’s smile broke back out.  “Well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we?”  Weirdly, she clapped Aidan on the butt.  Aidan just shook his head at this and said nothing.

“Let me skin this tub around this here rockpile and we’ll see if we can see a bit better,” Roger said as she headed back to the wheelhouse.  Ever so slowly the ship pulled away from its position, scraping its side against the rough promontory.  After she got it disengaged, Roger gunned the throttle and swung the ship around the outcrop.  The birds watched them impassively, their heads turning in a weird synchrony.  The ship paralleled the rocks for a few moments, then suddenly swung out of the mist.

It was like they had gone from swamp to sea.  The air was hot, but not the sticky, oppressive heat they had left behind.  This was equatorial, open-ocean heat, with a sea breeze carrying the tang of salt.  The blue, blue water stretched all around them, as far as anyone could see.  There was still no sun, but the quality of the light had changed from fading daylight to just a few hours off high noon.  Still, pockets of mist were everywhere, and off in the middle distance was a small patch of sand with a single palm tree—a cartoon version of a desert island.  Johnny breathed in the sea air and stared around in wonder.  Larissa looked with her wide eyes but said nothing.


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Vacationus Persistus

That's right, boys and girls: I'm still on vacation. I was going to try to get something written for you anyway, but it just hasn't turned out that way. Don't cry into your spilled soup though; I'll have something for you next week. Promise.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

Well, after over a year, vacation time is here again, and, in the words of the immortal Go-Go's, I got to get away. Or, in the words of another band which should be immortal: I'm going on a big vacation, 'cause I deserve some fun. So sad for you, no blog post today. Avail yourself of this opportunity to reread my inaugural post and remind yourself why you shouldn't care.

Chapter 16

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Upriver

Things soon settled back into the bizarre rhythm that passed for normal on the ship, while the strange pirate flag flapped continuously overhead.  Everyone ate whenever they were hungry, all at different times.  Everyone likewise slept whenever they were tired, again at different times.  There was but one bed on the ship anyway (and that was the hammock in Roger’s cabin), so if you got tired when someone else was already sleeping, you just made a makeshift pallet of whatever you could find.  As always, it was impossible to tell how much time passed.  It might have been days, if there had been such a thing as days in that place.

The time began to be liquid, each moment melting into the next and running backwards into the previous.  Johnny began having trouble remembering what order things had happened in, much less how long ago it was.  There was much time spent at the wheel, some time spent standing in comfortable silence at the railing with Larissa, some time spent chatting amiably with Roger (who was still trying to teach him how to fence, and still mostly failing), some time spent watching Aidan perform some sort of ceremony in the bow of the ship, which wasn’t quite prayer and wasn’t quite invocation and wasn’t quite ritual.  Random scenes jumbled together in Johnny’s mind.

“Are there cannons?” he asked Roger.

“Cannons?”  Her tone was puzzled.

“You know ... big guns.”

“Piffletwat.  What do we be needin’ guns for?”

“I dunno.  I just thought pirate ships had guns.”  Johnny shrugged.

“Ye know, I never actually said The Slyph was a pirate ship.”  Roger’s eyes twinkled.

“Oh.  Well, I just ... oh, c’mon!  What is that thing if it’s not a pirate flag?”

Roger glanced up at the fleur-de-lis-pierced skull.  “Aye, ye got me there, boyo.  Buccaneers we be, I can’t deny it.  But there’s other ways to get what ye want besides shootin’ a fella.”

He stared more closely at the trees.  There were flashes of bright colors accompanying the monkey shrieks, and for the first time he caught a glimpse of Bones’ wild brethren.  They were mostly larger than Bones, some with even longer tails, all with the same parrot beaks and combination wing-hands.  Where Bones was red and blue, these were red and blue and green and yellow and white, and even a few touches of pink and orange and purple here and there.  They burst forth from the heavy undergrowth near the edge of the river for the first time and swooped and dove around, screeching loudly.

Bones scampered up Johnny’s back and screeched right back at them.  “Worms, curs, and scoundrelous scallywags!” he added, for good measure.

Johnny was taken aback, and laughed in spite of himself.  Larissa said nothing, of course.  “Friends of yours?” he asked Bones.

“Lazy lagabouts!” Bones squawked.  “Bring the bosun ‘is starting rope!”  Apparently he felt this was sufficient comment on the topic; he took wing and disappeared around the corner of the deckhouse.

Johnny smiled at Larissa, who was still staring out at the banks of the river gliding by.  He noticed that the little blue snake was still wound around her wrist.

“So, what does that mean?”

“What, ‘Shallédanu lei shonta’?” Aidan asked.

“Yeah, that.  You say it all the time, and I’ve even heard Roger say it a time or two.”

“It’s a brief orison.  A benediction, a request for the goddess to lay her blessing on you.  Means, may the Lady of the Waters see my hood.”

“See your hood?”

Aidan smiled his small smile.  “May she recognize that I come with bowed head, is perhaps a better translation.”

Johnny nodded.

Roger poked him with the wooden sword.  Again.  “Ye’re woolgathering again, my little he-wench.”

Johnny’s mouth fell open, then he snorted.  “Oh, I’m your ‘he-wench’ now, am I?  Is that pirate talk for ‘boy toy’?”

Roger flashed her teeth at him.  “Oh, ye’d like that, wouldn’t ye?  Now pick up that waster and show me ye can block with it, or I’ll have you over my knee and show ye what he-wenches are good for.”  And then she lunged at him.

Johnny opened his eyes.  Something was wrong, but at first he couldn’t put his finger on it.  Then he realized: the ship wasn’t moving.  That was certainly unusual.  He rolled out of the hammock and came out onto the flying bridge.  He was about to thumb the brass speaker to ask Roger (or Aidan, if he was on the wheel) why they’d stopped, but then he saw Roger and Larissa down on the deck.  Roger glanced up and waved to him.  ”‘Hoy there, sleepybones.  Come watch the show.”

He followed their gaze and saw Aidan in the bow of the ship, holding his staff over his head with both hands.  He was chanting in that liquid language with its ancient tones, and the floating plants were swirling in little circles around the ship, some clockwise, and some counter-clockwise, alternating.  As he watched, fish started to rise up out of the water.  They were mottled, darker brown on tan, narrow, but heavy and long.  Their open mouths were full of jagged teeth, and Johnny knew these were the barracuda.  There were a dozen at least, all around them, standing on their tails and dancing slowly to and fro.  Suddenly smaller fish, flourescent green, shot up between every pair of barracuda, pectoral fins thrust out like wings, and began gliding in complex figure eights around the predators.  They were obviously flying fish, but flying fish shouldn’t be able to stay aloft like that, much less turn and swoop in those intricate patterns.  This amazing tableau continued for a few breathtaking moments, then the ship shuddered and actually rose up from the surface of the water.  Johnny could hear the water being thrashed about underneath the ship, then the whole strange menagerie began to move forward.

Johnny had learned to recognize the local flora well enough to know that the ship was now moving over solid ground, or at least as solid as the ground ever got in this swampy place.  The barracuda continued to dance along, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were leaving their watery home behind.  The flying fish continued to weave in and out among them.  After a few mintues, they reached the edge of what seemed like a large, open body of water.  The terrestrial plants gave way to the more familiar floating vegetation again, but it seemed less thick here than in the river.  Johnny could actually see the surface of the water in various places.  Suddenly the ship was thrown forward and hit the water with a huge splash.  Looking behind them now, Johnny could see that the ship had been borne on the backs of twenty or so serathodonts.  They were like a cross between an alligator and a dinosaur, with little evil eys set back in their crocodilian heads, dark blue and glistening, and walking on their hind legs.  They turned and began strolling casually back they way they had come.  The flying fish left off their figure eights and soared back towards the river.  The barracuda, apparently freed from their spell, now fell back to earth, snapping at the flying fish and the serathodonts and each other, then twisted their way back to the river, moving like sidewinders.  Soon the whole piscine parade was lost in the distance, and Johnny turned back around to find Aidan leaning wearily on his staff while Roger pounded him on the back in apparent congratulations.

Johnny descended the ladder to the deck and made his way through the maze of crates to the bow.  “Ye did it!” Roger was saying over and over.  “Aidan, me bucko, ye really did it!”

“What the fuck was that?” Johnny managed.

Roger turned and grabbed Johnny by the shoulders.  “We’ve crossed the riverhead,” she said, a fierce light burning in her eyes.  “We’ve reached Breen Lagoon!  We’re almost there now, by the goddess.  We’re almost there.”

Johnny looked around.  Wherever “there” was, it was certainly somewhere different.  Not only were the floating plants not abundant enough to completely cover the water, but he could make out the occasional outcropping of rock, and there was a thin mist hovering over the surface.  The sounds of screeching parrot-monkeys and hunting burrikits were gone, replaced by an occasional whistle of unknown origin, and faint yipping from far ahead of them.  The smell was less muddy earth and fecund vegetation and more clean water, with the faintest hint of salt.  When he consulted his new sense, the door behind them was just a pinprick of heat on his back, and the thing ahead was an icy spike in his core that sang to him, calling him forwards.

He felt as if they were in a place now between two worlds: the swamp world, with its muck monsters and burrikits and serathodonts and barracuda was behind them.  A fresh new place lay before them, its dangers as yet unknown.


>>next>>

What is this?

Fictional Pondering

I was going to have another half-chapter or so of the book up today, but I didn’t actually get anything written.  I’ve been busy trying to figure out what to write next, which isn’t particularly easy for me.  Now, I mentioned when I told you what this book thing is all about that a lot of what I’m doing here is just writing my way from one crazy dream idea to another.  Which is true enough.  And, honestly, at this point, I know which dream idea I’m writing away from, and I even know which dream idea I’m writing my way towards.  But the problem is how to get there.

Unfortunately, the next dream idea in the queue is almost the end of the book, and I need some stuff in between here and there.  And thinking up stuff isn’t my strong point ... I mean, that’s a big part of the reason why I’ve never published anything I’ve written, right?  No great ideas.

So I’ve been spending my time today going through old dream logs, and old roleplaying game campaign notes, and old stories, and anything else I can think of, waiting for inspiration to strike.  And a lot of it was quite inspirational, don’t get me wrong, but nothing that will really help me get to the next plot point (whatever that may be).  So my search continues.

I did run into the story/novel I wrote a mere chapter and a paragraph of before I started on Johnny Hellebore.  I’d totally forgotten about it.  It wasn’t a bad idea, just not a great one (story of my life).  But there might be something salvageable in it, so perhaps parts will show up in the JH saga at some point.  Weirdly, my story notes indicate that I was planning to put Larissa in that story as well; perhaps she was fresh in my mind from that attempted recycling when Johnny came along and needed a companion ...

Anyways, mostly I’m sure you don’t care.  Other than the fact that I don’t really have a blog post for today.  And even then you don’t care, if you’re smart.  But if you’re not smart—or, I suppose, to be less of a jerk about it, if you’re stubbornly insistent on reading this blog after all warnings to the contrary—then rest assured I’ll have something next week.

Chapter 15

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|<<first

What is this?

When he came to, he was draped over Roger’s naked back, staring upside-down at her muscular buttocks as she walked.  Her shoulder was digging into his gut, and he could feel a breast pressing up against his wet shorts.  Overall his first reaction was visceral.  He tried to distract himself by casting his mind back: how had he gotten here?  He must have drunk more than he should have.  The damned wine was so sweet; it didn’t taste alcoholic at all.  Less potent than the artan it may have been, but in the quantities he was putting it away, that hardly mattered.  He could remember an indulgent half-smile on Aidan’s face.  He could remember Roger telling him he was “squiffy,” and him cackling at that madly.  He could remember Bones squawking along with his laughter like a lower primates’ version of call-and-response.  He couldn’t remember Larissa participating, but that wasn’t surprising.  Roger was going up the ladder now, which meant that her grip on his upper thigh became even tighter, the view of her lower back became even more fascinating, and her chest thrust into his crotch rhythmically.  He gave up trying to remember how he’d gotten here and concentrated on thanking whatever divine force had engineered it.

The ride ended abruptly in a sucker punch of vertigo as Roger flipped him over into the hammock.  How she could manhandle him so easily, he couldn’t imagine; she was certainly fit, but he outweighed her by a good bit.  Yet she stood over him, hands on her hips, not even breathing hard.  “I see ye’re awake now,” she commented.

Johnny opened his mouth, then realized the folly of that maneuver and just nodded.

“You want me to get them pants off’n ye?”

Johnny stopped staring at her breasts and said “hunh,” primarily to buy a little more time while he considered this proposal.  Obviously the right thing to do would be to refuse politely.  But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to let her ... I mean, she did offer, right?

He noticed that Roger’s eyes were sparkling, and he had a sudden surety that she knew what he thinking, somehow.  He flushed bright red.  She voiced that  throaty chuckle that made Johnny’s hair squirm, and suddenly his wet shorts were way too tight.  “Oh, my bonny cabin boy,” Roger said, winking at him.  “Ye’re a gorgeous laddie, ye really are, and ye’re plenty man enough at this age.  I’ll not refuse ye if ye ask me again when yer head’s a mite clearer.  But right now it’d be like taking advantage of the town simpleton, and I’m just not that sort of woman.”  She lifted the arm closest to her and raised his hand to her mouth.  She kissed the tip of his index finger, then ran her tongue along the underside of it.  Lowering his hand, she placed it on her right breast, then squeezed his hand with hers.

She replaced the hand gently on his bare chest and touched his cheek briefly.  “Sleep now, boyo.  Mornin’ll make a fine mush of yer brain, I’m sure.  So catch yer winks while ye can.”

For all the dirty thoughts that were whizzing around his head, the body part that Johnny fixated on as he drifted off to sleep was her smile.

Underway

Johnny didn’t feel like he had a hangover.  His tongue felt too thick, granted, and maybe a bit fuzzy as well, but he didn’t really have a headache.  Nor did he feel sick to his stomach.  The fact that it was exactly as light as it had been “last night” was old hat by now, and he didn’t even feel particularly disoriented.  “Morning” hadn’t made a fine mush of his brain after all, it seemed.

He walked out onto the flying bridge.  Aidan waved at him and smiled.  Johnny waved back with half-lidded eyes and then descended to the deck.  Roger gave him her standard grin from her position at the wheel, but Johnny didn’t really want to make eye contact.  He walked around the deckhouse and discovered Larissa leaning on the railing, watching the swampy landscape float slowly by.

“Um, hey,” Johnny said.

Larissa arched an eyebrow, and he thought he could detect the barest hint of a smile, but she said nothing.

“So, um ... was I ... I mean, did I ... ?”  Johnny floundered.  Larissa’s eyebrow climbed even higher, which Johnny wouldn’t have thought possible.

Johnny thought he might be blushing.  “Yeah, never mind, I guess.”  They stood in silence for a while.  The gentle breeze of the ship’s passage actually felt very good on Johnny’s face.  He hadn’t realized how stuffy he’d felt, and it was only now that the danger was past that he realized he had been feeling a bit nauseous after all.

One of the little light blue snakes twirled up the vertical post of the railing, practically a blur.  It shot up onto the crossbar, slithered along it for a bit, then wrapped itself tightly around Larissa’s wrist.  Johnny watched the whole thing with interest.  After a moment in which Larissa made no move to dislodge the little reptile, Johnny asked, “Are you going to throw it back?”

Larissa pointed down at the plant-covered surface of the water.  Cutting through the duckweed and bladderwort and water lettuce, easily keeping pace with the ship, was a large fin.  Although it moved like a shark fin, it was obviously a large fish: the thin membrane of the fin stretched across four or five stiff spines.  The color was a mottled brown, very similar to the color of the water.  As Johnny watched, the fin folded neatly down and disappeared, although he couldn’t shake the feeling that the fish itself was still there.

“The anterior dorsal fin is much too large, of course,” Larissa commented.  “And they don’t generally swim just under the surface like that.  Nor are they colored like that, and of course they aren’t freshwater fish, as I mentioned before.  But it certainly does appear to be some variant of barracuda.”  She glanced at the snake wrapped around her wrist.  “Obviously it’s impossible to say what a ‘swamp barracuda’ might eat, but one could surmise.”

Johnny nodded.

They stood in comfortable silence for a while, then Johnny happened to glance up at the front of the boat.  There was a flag that had never been there before—hell, the flagpole had never been there before.  Despite the fact that Roger appeared to be a pirate, and her ship appeared to be a pirate ship, there had never been a pirate flag flying over it.  But now ...

It wasn’t a traditional Jolly Roger.  Oh, there was a white skull all right, but the background was a dark green instead of black.  And instead of the crossed bones underneath the skull, there was a red fleur-de-lis with golden edges.  The center point of the fleur-de-lis protuded through the top of the skull like a spear and its roots were clenched between the bony teeth; the petals stuck out of the sides of the skull like bizarre ears.  Johnny stared at it, his mouth open.  “Where did that thing come from?” he finally managed.

Larissa did not look at the flag.  She inclined her head aft; Johnny couldn’t see Roger from where they stood, but he knew what Larissa meant.

He looked back at the banner flying above.  It flapped in the wind rather smartly; Johnny looked back at the river underneath, layered in its vegetal blanket, then at the trees he could see on the shores.  They were zipping by with a speed that was nearly alarming; Johnny felt a twinge of nausea after all.  He looked back at the planks of the ship.  Obviously Roger had decided they were going to really start moving now.

He cast his feeling out, upstream.  The door was still behind them; it wasn’t fading, exactly, but it seemed more like a twinkling star than a steady light.  And ahead ... he could almost feel it, then his sense just slipped off it.  One thing he could tell: if the door behind him was a heat, the thing ahead of them was a cold, like someone had left the door to the North Pole ajar, and arctic winds were blowing through with wild abandon.

Reluctantly he turned his back on Larissa and walked back to the wheelhouse.  He could almost feel eyes on his back.  Were he to turn around, he knew that gaze would be merely curious, nothing more.

He sat beside Roger, who wore her habitual grin.  “Better this fine mornin’?” she boomed over the roar of the fan.

He started to point out that this wasn’t “morning” any more than it had been “night” when he’d passed out in the hammock, but knew that wasn’t going to get him anywhere.  He stared mostly at his boots, still not ready to look her in the eyes.

He closed his mouth and just nodded.

“You heave up at all?”  Roger sounded genuinely interested.

“Nah,” he said.

“Impressive!”  She slapped him across his shoulder blades, startling him, and almost making a liar out of him right in front of her.  “Ye really know how to hold yer liquor for such a young pup!”

“Yeah, I ...”  Johnny swallowed to try to settle his stomach a bit.  “I’ve heard that before, actually.”  He took a quick peek at her face.  She seemed fascinated to see what he would say next.  “Listen, about last night ...”

This was not a conversation that Johnny had ever had to have before, but he felt that it was the other person’s job to break in at this point, telling him it was nothing and not to worry about it.  Perhaps he’d seen too many romantic comedies.  Roger stayed stubbornly silent.

“I just feel like I should apologize ...” he tried again.

Now she did butt in.  “Now, now, boyo, ye were stirred up lookin’ at me body.  Don’t apologize for that!  Ye risk causing insult if ye steer that course too long.”  He looked at her now; her smile was still there, perhaps a bit more gentle than usual.  “Ye’re a man in his prime”—she paused and eyed him appraisingly up and down—“or at least near enough to droppin’ anchor in them waters, and I’ve been told I got a pretty fine fettle.”  She winked.  “The wonder would’ve been if ye hadn’t stood up to attention.”  It took a moment for this crude expression to sink in, and then Johnny blushed.

Roger punched him lightly in the shoulder.  “So clear yer pretty little head.  But I meant what I said last night, Johnny boy.  If ye come around askin’ sometime when ye ain’t four or five sheets to the wind, ye may find a little more luck.  And if ye don’t come askin’, I won’t take no offense.”

Johnny swallowed hard.  “Um, thanks,” he said.

“I feel like I gotta lay it out plain for ye,” Roger continued.  ”‘Cause ye come from away.  But that’s pretty common amongst us folks ‘round here.  Ye press the flesh where ye can find it, ’cause tomorrow ye pay the piper, and ye never know when ye might come up short.  Hell, we were almost sunk on the way to Aidan’s, nought?  I reckon his gimcracked Goddess was good for somethin’ after all.”  There was a tremendous splash behind the boat, and the ship rocked to and fro just the tiniest bit.  Roger laughed loudly and raised her voice even more.  “Aye, missy!  I hear ye!  Shallédanu lei shonta and all that.”  She made a complicated hand gesture with her free hand.

“So, basically what I’m tellin’ ye is: sail for today in case today is all ye get.  Ye ketch?”

Johnny looked up at her and smiled.  “Yer a cheery lass, ain’t ye?”

Roger guffawed and slapped him on the back again.  “Aye, that I am, Johnny boy.”

The slipstream around the deckhouse formed its vortex right where they were sitting.  The wind ruffled through Johnny’s hair and made Roger’s ponytail fly straight out behind her, almost reaching the fanblades.  No one spoke for a moment.

“Man,” Johnny said finally, “we’re really hauling ass, eh?”

Roger nodded.  “No need for dawdlin’.”

Another pause.  “It’s dangerous up there, isn’t it?”

“Johnny me boyo, it’s dangerous right here.  You know what they say about life?  She’s a brilliant helsman, but she still kills all her passengers.”  Roger nudged him in the side.

Johnny couldn’t help but return her grin.  “Well, sail on then, cap’n.  I’m ready.”

Roger squeezed his knee and twisted the “wheel” a little harder.  The Slyph shot through the plant-covered water even faster.

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>>next>>

What is this?

Chapter 14

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What is this?

 

|<<first

Making Wine

Aidan had brought all he needed for the journey with him, so from the clearing they returned directly to The Sylph, where he began stowing away gear while Roger guided them expertly out of their mooring.

“So ...”  Johnny hardly knew where to begin asking questions.  “What exactly do you do, Mr. de Tourneville?”

Aidan grinned at him.  He had a very easy grin that lit up his whole face, although he seemed to use it much more sparingly than Roger.  “Save you from muck monsters, apparently.  And call me Aidan, son.”

This mode of address struck Johnny as odd, somehow ... perhaps it was just that Aidan seemed not so much older than he was.  He was no more than twenty-five, surely: fresh-faced and clean-shaven, barely taller than Johnny and not much heavier either.  Perhaps it was a religious thing.  “So, are you, like, a priest?”

“I’m a Guide,” Aidan replied.  “I believe I mentioned that already, didn’t I?”  He winked at Johnny, then glanced over at Larissa.  He said in a stage whisper: “She doesn’t talk much, eh?”  He stuck out his hand at her.  “Aidan de Tourneville, milady.  And you are ...?”

Larissa took his hand and shook it.  “There doesn’t appear to be enough indigenous wildlife in this area to support a predator of that size.  What does it eat?”

Aidan looked taken aback.  “Pretty much anything it likes, unfortunately.  But not us.  Not today, at any rate.  Tomorrow, who can say?  But hopefully the Goddess will watch over us.”

Larissa stared up at him with her wide eyes.  “And what goddess would that be?” she asked.

“Shallédanu, Goddess of the Waters.  She is omnipresent, in this place.”  The Water Guide looked back at Johnny.  “She’s a curious one, eh?”

Johnny nodded.  “She is that.”

Aidan didn’t seem perturbed that he had not learned Larissa’s name.  “Well, at least our journey is off to an auspicious beginning.”

Johnny frowned.  “Being attacked by a giant homicidal creature is an auspicious beginning?”

“Surviving being attacked by a giant homicidal creature is, surely.  Much better than the alternative, no?”  He looked around.  “I assume this craft has a tub on board?”




It seemed like skinnydipping in the boat’s hold was some sort of tradition when bringing on new crew members.  Johnny was more prepared this time, however, and had found a pair of shorts among Roger’s extra clothes which could double as swimming trunks.  Larissa just took off her shoes and rolled the loose pants up above her knees; she sat on the side of the square opening of the tub and trailed her bare legs in the brownish water.  Roger and Aidan both seemed perfectly comfortable being naked.  Aidan’s body was lean and pale, and he sported several serious scars: on his right shoulder, the left side of his ribcage, and his right hip, among others.  Johnny continued to try to avoid looking at Roger’s body, but her lack of modesty was starting to put him more at ease.

There was less washing this time and more friendly chatting and socializing.  Roger and Aidan exchanged ideas about the upcoming weather and their general course.  None of their navigation talk included any directions such as “west” or “north”; it was all “upstream” and “leeward” and “deasil.”  Johnny was only half paying attention.  Mainly he was looking more closely at the fiery columns of the tub and trying to figure out how it worked.  The fire was only in the corners; between the columns there appeared to be some sort of invisible barrier which kept out wildlife but not the current.  The water was quite warm, although he suspected that was some function of the tub more than the natural temperature of the river.  He could see shadowy forms swimming on the far side of the barrier, but nothing clearly—the barrier might seem invisible, but it did make things on its far side appear dimmer.

At some point, Roger called for Bones to fetch “some grub” and suddenly they were having a dinner party in the pool-sized tub.  There was the usual greenish cheese, dried fig-like fruits, and jerky-esque pemmican, but Roger evidently felt this was a special occasion, because she had Bones bring out several things Johnny hadn’t seen before: a type of small citrus fruit that Larissa hesitantly identified as a kumquat, some sort of crusty bread that was hard as a rock on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside, small green pea-like beans (uncooked but still quite good), and some form of pickle that looked like mushrooms and smelled like the clove cigarettes that some of the night people in DC smoked.  Bones provided cups, and they just scooped water out of the tub.  It  occurred to Johnny that he ought to be discomfited that they were drinking water they’d just been bathing in, but of course the water in the tub was still flowing past with the slow current, so it was theoretically just as fresh as the water that they’d been drawing from the river for the entire journey.

Johnny tried a little bit of everything, and it was all good.  Larissa seemed more hesitant, sniffing the offerings and eyeing them critically.  Aidan and Roger were positively festive, the former complimenting his host repeatedly, the latter calling out colorful pirate phrases such as “heave to with the hard tack, swabbies” and “belay forestalling them fungus afore I have ye keelhauled!”  Gradually the proceedings wound down and everyone became a bit more pensive.

Aidan was now leaning back with his elbows on the side of the tub, his lean body extended nearly horizontally, just under the surface of the water.  He paddled aimlessly with his feet, his toes occasionally breaking the surface.  “I think,” he announced, “it is time for some wine.”

Johnny looked around with interest.  “We have wine?”

“Not yet,” Aidan said, winking.  “Bones, my good man.  Fetch me a pitcher.”  Bones squawked and streaked over to Aidan, sitting up on his back legs in a manner more reminiscent of a dog than either avian or primate.  It cocked its head and stared at the young man, who was now giving detailed instructions.  “Your best pitcther, mind.  It must be solid silver—you have such a thing?”  This was directed at Roger, who nodded.  “Good.  The silver, then.  And fresh cups.  And then look in the left-hand pocket of my robe and bring me the gray pouch you find there.”

Bones streaked off with another squawk.  Johnny swam over to Aidan and perched on the side of the tub as he had done once upon a time in his family swimming pool.  “You’re going to make wine?  Doesn’t that take ... well, a long time?”

“And distillation equipment,” Larissa added softly, as if she were just saying it to make herself feel better and didn’t expect anyone to pay any attention to her.  She was right about that, of course.

Aidan grinned.  “The important thing to know about wine, my dear boy, is that it’s mostly water.  And I, of course, am a Water Guide.”

Johnny was starting to think that the inhabitants of this world used the word “guide” in a way that was quite different than he was used to.

Bones streaked back with a hefty pitcher nearly as big as he was and a soft gray bag with a rawhide drawstring.  Aidan took the pitcher (“thankee kindly, sir” he said to Bones) and scooped it through the water.  From the pouch, Aidan removed a handful of small round objects, like colored ball bearings.  Most were a dark blue, but several were red, and a few were white.

“What’re those?” Johnny asked, still fascinated.

“Berries,” Aidan announced.

Johnny wrinkled his brow.  “So the blue ones are blueberries, I suppose ... the red ones are cherries?”

Larissa spoke up.  “Not blueberries: juniper berries.  Although where one finds a conifer in a swamp I can’t imagine.  And definitely not cherries ... something else.  But they’re too small.”

Aidan nodded.  “I take the water out of them.  Easier to carry, and they don’t spoil this way.”

“But they don’t look like dried fruit ...” Johnny started, before realizing that this was almost certainly a futile line of inquiry.

“Dried?”  Aidan seemed genuinely puzzled.  “What, you mean like the derries?”  He gestured at the fruit Johnny had been calling figs.  “No, I just ... take the water out of them.  And the red ones are hawberries.”  Larissa looked slightly dubious, although she nodded.

“And the white ones?” Johnny asked.

“Snowberries,” Aidan said, tossing the pile of miniature berries into the pitcher.

Even Johnny couldn’t let that go.  “Snowberries?  As in, snow?  You have snow here?”

“Strictly speaking, snow isn’t required for snowberries.”  Aidan’s tone was mild.

Larissa opened her mouth, but Johnny already knew what she was going to say, and he knew they weren’t going to get anywhere complaining that people oughtn’t have words for things they’d never experienced, so he cut her off.  “Snow is made of water, you know.”

Aidan arched an eyebrow.  “Well of course I know that.  Shall I make you some?”  He scooped up a handful of water and blew on it, hard.  The water shot out of his hand and swirled around, each drop maintaining its individuality so that it was more like dust than splash.  The cloud of droplets floated upward, defying gravity, then began to sparkle.  Finally there was a puff, and then several snowflakes fell down onto Johnny’s unbelieving face.  They melted instantly of course, but there was a split-second when he could actually feel tiny pinpricks of cold against his skin.  He stared at Aidan.  Larissa’s face was neutral.  Roger chuckled in the background.

Aidan ignored all this.  “Now, where was I?  Ah, yes.”  He reached into his pouch again, and took out a smaller handful of yellow powder.  He sprinkled this into the pitcher slowly, mumbling in that same liquid language he had used against the muck monster.  A luminescence began to appear above the pitcher, ephemeral, like the yellowish-green lights Johnny sometimes saw shooting off to the edges of his vision if he rubbed his eyes too hard.  And, like those phosphenes, the lights seemed to slide away if stared at directly, and yet irresistably drew the eye toward them.  Straining his ears, Johnny thought—or imagined—a fizzing sound, a muted version of bubbles escaping from soda, or champagne.

Slowly the light subsided, and Aidan poured from the silver pitcher into the simple wooden cups Bones had brought.  The liquid had changed from the brown tealike color of the river to a rich indigo, with a hint of effervescent yellow somehow buried in its core.  Aidan poured four times, and then Bones poked him with a much smaller tin cup.  Aidan chuckled and poured a dollop for Bones as well.

Larissa stared at her cup but didn’t drink.  Roger and Aidan each took a long draught and made nearly identical lip-smacking “ahh” sounds.  Johnny sipped his cautiously.

To describe it would have been impossible.  It was slightly sweet, but it definitely had the bite he recalled from stealing sips from his mother’s wine glass when she wasn’t looking.  It was fruity in a way that he had never tasted before, sort of a raspberry-blackberry-boysenberry, but wrapped up in the odor he associated with his father’s gin and tonics (he’d never dared sneak a taste of those, but the smell had always stayed with him), and yet none of that, and all of that, and more.  It was dry, and cold, and it seemed to dance on his tongue.  He stared at Aidan, amazed.

Aidan smiled back at him. “Not too shoddy, if I do say so myself.  Roger?”

Roger had adopted Aidan’s pose on the side of the tub to their left.  She arched her back, thrusting her small breasts up into the air.  “Vurra nice, me bucko.  Not artan, of course, but a pleasant enough change.  Ye make a fine cuppa, Aidan.”

Johnny started to drink again, more eagerly this time, but he stopped himself.  “Is this going to get me drunk?” he asked.  “Like the artan if I drink it too fast?”

Aidan pursed his lips.  “Well, it is wine, and it will surely make you tipsy if you drink enough of it.  But it doesn’t have nearly the alcohol content of that curious concoction that our fine captain favors.”  He looked archly at Roger, as if he’d just delivered a real zinger of an insult to her.  Roger merely pshawed him with a lazy wave of her arm.

This was good enough for Johnny.  He drank the rest of his cup in big gulps, and then he started in on Larissa’s.





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What is this?

It’s Just Semantics (Except When It’s Not)

As an English major and aspirant writer, I know that the words we choose are vitally important.  As a professional programmer and longtime corporate denizen, I know that changing words around doesn’t actually change the reality of the situation.  Boy, it’s a good thing I believe in balance and paradox, eh?

The question of whether the phrase “it’s semantics” is invested with concern or derision is a delicate one.  In my role as a parent, language is most often a tool used by my children to try to get out of following one of our (very few) family rules.  For instance, rule #1 is “don’t step on things that aren’t the floor.”

“What about the ground?”

“Obviously you can step on the ground.”

“Well, what about the carpet?  That’s not actually the floor.”

“Look, don’t play semantics with me.  I ain’t raising no lawyers!”

In these types of instances, I’m nearly always fighting to make the point that the exact words don’t matter as much as the ideas behind them.  Use a little common sense, man.  Don’t try to twist the words.

On the other hand, in my role as a writer, whether that’s for work, for personal stuff, or in my delusional life where I am writing the next great fantasy series, the exact word you choose is crucially important.  The shades of meaning that separate two apparent synonyms become vital: maybe the audience will understand roughly what I mean either way, but “roughly” just ain’t good enough.  If you can’t write any better than that, you should just give it up right now.

And then there’s my role as a business programmer.  And here’s where it gets tricky, because suddenly both viewpoints are simultaneously important.  On the one hand, I have to deal with people who have technical ideas which are disastrous, but they think they’re brilliant just because they changed a couple of words.  On top of that, I work for a corporation.  It’s not full-on Dilbert by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly does happen that our corporate overlords will try to dress up a bad idea in pretty words and think we’re going to be fooled.  (All corporations do this ... they just can’t help themselves.)

And yet ...

And yet all too often I find myself in a situation where words really do matter.  The most common one is when choosing language at the beginning of a project.  You would (probably) be quite surprised at how vital it is to get definitions straight for a project.  Simply choosing the wrong word can cost a company thousands (if not millions) of dollars in lost time and miscoummunication.  How could that possibly be, you ask?  Simple—I’ve seen it happen time and again.  The business means something very specific when it uses a word, but somehow that’s miscommunicated to the technical people.  They start using the same word to mean something very different—always closely related, of course, but still different in some crucial way.  Suddenly the business people and the technical people aren’t speaking the same language.  And it spreads, and it gets all mixed up: mostly the new technical people learn what the words means from the other technical people, so they have the second defintion, but every once in a while one will learn it from a business person (or have their definition corrected by a business person) and now the technical people are miscommunicating with the other technical people.  Same thing happens with the business people, some of whom pick up the alternate definition that the tech department has given the word as a matter of self-defense for not losing their sanity when trying to talk to engineers.  Now no one is on the same page, not even the people in the same department, and specs get confused, mistakes get made, assumptions are propagated, work is delayed ... if you’re fortunate (or unfortunate) enough to realize there are two definitions, then every single time you see the word, you have to find the person who wrote it and ask them which way they meant it.  And sometimes they don’t even really know: they just meant it whichever way some other person meant it, so now you have to track down that person and ask them.  Trust me, such a little thing as what a word means in a particular context can have a profound financial impact on a project, not to mention its impact on the frustration level of the people working on it.

And words have a tendency to get stuck.  Once a bunch of people all agree on a word and its meaning, you will be using that word forever.  Doesn’t matter if tomorrow you find out that the word is completely wrong.  Doesn’t matter if what the word really means is something completely different, and will confuse anyone who happens to understand the proper definition.  Doesn’t matter if the word is already being used by someone else for something entirely different.  At the point at which three or more people all use a word to mean X, it will mean X to those people forever, and no attempt to change the word will ever be successful.  So not only is the word important for what it means today, but it’s important for a long time to come.

And because I have this pet peeve about making the same mistake twice, I do a lot of correcting people when they use the wrong word, or use the right word in the wrong context, or use a word that isn’t going to mean what they think it means to everyone else in the company (even if the people who are going to get confused don’t happen to be in the room at the time).  Because I’ve seen it go wrong before and I really don’t want to see it again.  And then I’m on the receiving end of that frustrated “it’s just semantics” lecture.

And I’m going: yes, I know.  And I agree with you.  Except for right now.  ‘Cause, right now, the words are important.

This is a frustrating position to be in, because it makes you look inconsistent, or worse: hypocritical.  “Wait a minute,” people will say to me.  “When I tried to correct your word yesterday, you said it didn’t really matter which word I used.  Now you’re up my ass nitpicking my language.  What’s up with that?” And I find it difficult to explain.  Partially because it’s a true paradox: both are true at once.  And partially because it’s a matter of balance: you need to know when to lean one way and when to lean the other.

You see, the truth is the words really don’t matter.  All that matters are the ideas underneath.  Changing the way you describe an idea doesn’t actually change the idea.  A stupid idea is always going to be stupid and it doesn’t matter how you dress it up.  A good idea is always going to be good regardless of how badly you describe it.  The fundamental nature of the idea doesn’t change regardless of the words that are used to express it.

Except there’s a problem.  An idea exists in my mind; I don’t have any way to instantly transfer it to yours.  There’s only one way that I can share my idea with you: I put it into words.  Then, as any college student of Communications 101 knows, I have become the transmitter, and you the receiver, and the idea is the signal, and there will always be noise.  Noise comes in many forms, but often the words themselves are a form of noise.  Because words are an imperfect form to stuff an idea into.  Words are slippery, and no two people are going to have exactly the same combination of denotation and connotation for every word they use in their conversations.  So if I use the wrong word, you get the wrong impression, and suddenly you have the wrong idea: it’s not my idea any more.  It’s similar—perhaps extremely similar—but not exactly my idea.  Of course, it’s not your idea either—as far as you’re concerned, it’s my idea.  It’s some shadow of my idea, mangled in transmission, not really anyone’s any more, but with a twisted life of its own.

So obviously the words do matter.  My choice of words is crucial, because it’s the only way I have to make sure the idea doesn’t get warped out of true on its way to you.  It’s going to get warped, mind you—nothing either of us can do about that, it’s just the nature of the beast—but perhaps, if I can just find the right words, it won’t get warped too badly.  Perhaps it will still be mostly my idea ... close enough to still work.

So I suppose the trick is to know when choosing a different word will help the idea come through more clearly, and when you’re just fiddling with the window dressing.  I try to figure out which is which every day, and I bet I get it wrong a lot.  But I keep trying, because the words are important.

Except when they’re not, of course.

The Demon Sony

So, it looks like I’m spending my entire weekend playing Little Big Planet.  This is because the past three years’ worth of Little Big Planet costumes, objects, decorations, and building materials, collected by three out of four humans in our household in quite serious fashion, were on the PS3 that finally broke down.  And Sony, in their infinite brilliance, designed the PS3 so that you can’t retrieve data off a dead machine.  Clever, eh?

Now, you may say to yourself, but a PS3 just has a standard hard drive in it, right?  Just pull that sucker out and hook it up to a PC.  Easy enough, but then you can’t read it, because Sony has encrypted the entire drive.  Copy protection for their games, don’t you know.  No problem, you might think.  Put the old hard drive into a hard drive enclosure with a USB interface and treat it as an external hard drive on the new PS3.  Nope, doesn’t work: not only is the hard drive encrypted, it’s encrypted with a key taken from the hardware chip in the machine.  In other words, hard drives encrypted with one PS3 can’t be read by another PS3.  Again, copy protection.  Well, you say, I heard that Sony just invented a new data transfer thing so that you can copy directly from one PS3 to another ...  Nope.  You have to be able to fire up the old machine in order to start the data transfer.  How convenient for their customers.

Not that Sony is particularly concerned about their customers.  As we can tell from the fact their security is such a joke that a handful of anonymous hackers took them down for 26 days.  Think about that for a minute.  All the press reports I’ve heard want us to be pissed off at whichever hacker group fired off this attack (although we still aren’t completely sure which one it was).  But screw that.  I want you to think about it.  A multi-billion dollar company with employees and offices worldwide got pwned by what was most likely six to ten nerds hanging out in their moms’ basements.  It’s sort of like if your bank came to you and said “Well, all the money in your account just got stolen by a couple of teenagers in ski masks.  We’re real sorry about that.  These criminals must be stopped!” Would you really feel sorry for your bank, taken advantage of like that by evil kids?  Or would you wonder why this giant institution that makes tons of money off you isn’t taking more seriously the idea of keeping your shit safe?

On the positive side, at least it probably cost them a billion or so.  Serves ’em fucking right.

So we waited for 26 days to be able to get back online, to be able to get stuff from the Playstation Store and play online levels with the world and whatnot, and then almost as soon as it’s back our PS3 goes YLOD.  Of course, I didn’t even know what that meant until it happened to me, but apparently it’s quite common.  Certainly a Google search for “ps3 ylod” turns up nearly 2 million results.  It stands for “yellow light of death” (in a nod to the infamous Windows BSOD), and it’s called that because the little light on your PS3 that’s usually either red (if it’s off) or green (if it’s on) turns to yellow and it won’t boot up.  It results from overheating, which is, again, something Sony most likely could have prevented with a little tighter quality control issues.  (And, if you think they couldn’t have, riddle me this: why is it that the newer models don’t suffer from this problem?  Obviously it’s possible to avoid it.) Sony itself offers you nothing to help with this problem.  If your machine is still under warranty, you can get a new machine, but, of course, your data is just lost.  If you’re not even under warranty, you’re really screwed.

So I went online and found someone who does electronics and specializes in fixing these sorts of problems.  And he fixed it.  And it worked ... for a while.  Then it started having a whole different problem, and now it won’t even come on at all.  I took it back to the same fellow, and he says the GPU (that’s the graphics processing unit) is fried.  And you can’t replace it.  So we’re back to being just screwed.

So we bought a new PS3 Friday night.  It’s another $350 down the drain, and now we have to rebuild all our saved stuff.  The only saving grace is that anything we actually purchased is still available for download, so at least we don’t lose all the money we’ve dropped on Sony over the past three years.  Just all the time we spent unlocking levels and collecting stuff.

While Little Big Planet is the biggest loss for us—three quarters of the humans in our house are fairly well addicted to it—it’s the not the only one.  Since my friend Benny first showed me a tower defense game on his iPhone, I’ve been obsessed with that class of games, so of course I have PixelJunk Monsters, one of the best examples of the genre.  Looks like I’ll be starting over on that one too.  My elder son will be starting over on Half-Life 2, Portal (both 1 and 2), and Fallout New Vegas.  My younger son has already started fresh on Costume Quest (a very cute little game; if you haven’t heard of it, you should check it out).  And those are just the biggies.  There are countless other games in which all progress has been erased.

Now, my general attitude towards video games is that they’re time wasters.  I learned long ago (when my college roommates pointed out to me that I’d lost a whole day to Phantasy Star IV, in fact) that I can’t afford to spend too much time on them.  And I try to teach this attitude to my children as well.  It’s just a game, I tell them.  And so it is.  But it still pisses me off to lose all this time just because a greedy company cares so little for me and my data.  It reminds of what may possibly be the most awesome footnote ever written, which appears in the book Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.  In it, there is a character named the demon Crowley, and he happens to have a computer.  There is a description of said computer, which leads to this footnote:

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighborhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should be considered lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches.  Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: “Learn, guys.”

I mean, seriously: if demons are cribbing notes from our software EULAs, I think there must be something wrong here.

So today I’m quite down on corporations.  Not that I’m ever up on corporations, of course.  But even more so today.  And, as I’ve spent about 48 hours now trying to keep my children from killing each other as they try to work together to restore all their LBP swag, I’m a bit tired as well.  Not the way I saw spending my weekend.  Video games are supposed to be fun, right?  Thanks a bunch, Sony.  Now I’m even cursed by my gaming consoles.  Sigh.