Wind On Fire

The Wind on Fire Trilogy is one of the best young fantasy series I could recommend.
I'm in the middle of rereading the second book right now and it's a wonderful and strange feeling, to re-experience the actual book and my initial memory/feelings (and subsequent reading/feelings) at the same time.

I think the reason the Harry Potter books were so beloved - not just enjoyed, but loved - was due to the fact that they grew up with us.

This only half means the characters aged as we aged - although that was significant.
I mean the writing style, the seriousness of the plot, the interactions of the characters, the subject matter, all got progressively more....adult, as we did.
I mean, the first one is sort of a "tralala yerawizardEri, ever flavor beans" and the third one is "hey, there are actual dark wizards around" and the fourth one is where things start going "hey, woah, holy shit", and the fifth is "oh my god fuck" and the sixth is "fuckfuckfuck" and the seventh is just a soundless, agape O-shaped mouth.

So that metaphor was stupid.

The Wind on Fire trilogy is a much better and condensed example of works growing up with the readers. It's one of the few book series that I would actually want to space out throughout a young readers life, on a scale of months if not years. (Other series, I hear you asking me to support my argument, include Ursula LeGuinn's Earthsea [from, say, sixth to eighth grade] and honestly maybe even His Dark Materials, just for the emotional content requiring maturity [not, of course, to insinuate with great age comes great maturity. In these examples I am {as I am entitled to do on this blog} assuming the hypothetical person we are discussing is merely a copy of myself.] in order to be fully understood)

Ah, been a while since I let one of those triple-bracketers out. Must be this rereading of old books. I'm a sentimental old man.

Each book is just so different, so changed, so perfect for its specific duty.
The rarity of three separate and specific things working harmonically, carrying a thread of characters and story throughout, just makes you appreciate it all the more each time you change books.

The first one, The Wind Singer, is a fable. Possibly even a fairy tale.
It's a journey story, it's a fantasy novel in which there is set a stage and a cast of characters and we learn about the history and the past and everything is told in simple terms and...has this dreamy quality about it that you just accept. No, not accept as in you acknowledge and read in spite of - I mean it has that matter of fact statement of the incredible style in the manner of American tall tales (i.e. "Well, what I reckon I need is a gun, said Pecos Bill. So he invented himself the six shooter.)
The children go on a journey. There is a goal of salvation, an evil to oppose them, a clear delineation of good and bad, a diverse cast of characters.
Everything is so simple - not stupid, not small, just simple. There is only one of everything. The mountain is The Mountain. The desert is The Desert. People who are good are All Good, and those who are Evil are Pure Evil (and, may I add, downright unsettling).

This is not to say that it is a typical tale, of course. The Wind Singer is lovely and original. It is beautiful and captivating and it ends happily and with closure. This book could exist alone, and ought to for the young child who reads it.


Because Slaves of the Mastery, the second book, tears it all down five years later. With terrible beauty. The City and its People burn to death. Are enslaved. Are marched across the land.

It makes the world so much bigger. There are other, greater evils than The Greatest and Only Evil. There are other cities, other lands, other peoples, and they need slaves. Characters who were toddlers are now fully fledged young identities. The older among them are that much closer to death.
Characters who were teens are now young adults.
And all that that entails.

Slaves of the Mastery is the best of the books, simply because of the level of wonderment that comes from seeing this (beautifully rendered, fully functioning) two dimensional world and its characters suddenly get fleshed into three full dimensions.
New characters who are perfectly shaped to interact with these updated older characters are introduced. Unchanging concepts are, of course, challenged. Changed.
And behind it all, built upon the vague allusions of the first book, the real trilogy-wide storyline begins to take shape. We are given glimpses of the great and terrible future.

It is a time of exciting adolescence, of death and love and fight-dances and dance-fights. People die.
(It is worth noting here that the author of this book has written some other examples of this sort of thing.)


People we cared about die.
And people we hate, with good reason, die!
And some people who don't die, grow up and kill!
Or love.

I read the first Hunger Games book (with no small amount of apprehension, due to everyone reacting exactly the same when I asked them about it), and the whole time I couldn't shake the feeling that I was being instructed to feel strongly about something that didn't quite deserve the amount of emotion it was asking of me. It was a strange feeling, no doubt, but a highly specific one. It was too heavy handed in its emphasis that this was the thing I should be feeling contempt or horror or enthusiasm or hope for, and this was the thing I should be feeling at this time.
Several times I was reminded of a scene that paralleled the Hunger Games in Slaves of the Mastery, that managed to accomplish similar things with less everything and more skill. It spurred me to reread this series.

The best thing is how different it all feels, compared to the first one. Everything is ambiguous, and heroes behave poorly (but not in a heavy handed way, merely in a natural progression of events way) and -even worse- sometimes the evil is calm, compassionate, and rational. Sometimes the evil is beautiful and compelling.

The whole book is beautiful and compelling. But still....young adult, of course. Always with that grain of sand.

I mean salt.



The third one, Firesong, is exactly that.

I have no words for Firesong.

People die. Everyone dies.
Everyone also lives, of course. Because it's that type of book.
There is less time dilation, it pretty much picks up from the end of the second book - but then again, it follows all the way to the end of everyone's lives.
Everyone.
Characters from the second book that were picked up are changed as thoroughly as those from the first book were changed in the beginning of the second.
Everyone is older still.
Good and evil are totally ambiguous, and the style of telling even more so.
Back comes the dreamlike quality, in which our protagonists(?) drift through a world of incredible art and wonder, back comes the travel through a magical land with a cast of strange characters, but along with it comes the sobering reality of the second book.
If book one was the seed, and book two was the tree, book three is the house the tree was built into. And the fire the tree was burned in. And all the influences the tree has had.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to follow multiple lives throughout a trilogy of books of startling literary difference and somehow come out with an ending that is satisfying?
Sure, it's heartbreaking and gorgeous and final, but it's perfect. It fits, god damn it.

I'm so excited to finish the second and read the third book.
I'm so terrified.
Really. I'm apprehensive. I mean, how often do you reread the Amber Spyglass? This is not light reading. There are going to be tribulations. I know what the outcome is going to be, and I am still wary.

Read these fucking books.

(Holy shit man I just watched half of Gladiator again. Oh man.)

its important for you to remember, when cooking...to use food

This magical girl has won my heart

Each one is better than the last.

They are all amazing

No one wins a dance, boy

I have nobody that can play with me.
dear diary shut up.
It is still strange to think there are people who struggle to swim, who find it unnatural or awkward.
not that I don't fear water, mind you
I feel the same way about people who don't know how to play chess.
Their parents never taught it to them?
Why not?
It's important!
It's the game of kings.

People think this implies kings play it, or used to.
Wrong.
It's a pun.

IIIIII geeeeet iiiiit shut up.

I like chess. And, as usual, I tend to hate people who take it too seriously.
None of this rook-to-E4 frippery.
None of this "Compte de Buckfenwald's Gambit" opening movery.
I like old men in the park chuckling amiably at the inevitable failure that comes from getting too clever with their pieces, when they ought to know better.
I like the excitement that comes from watching your opponent stumble into a trap you hung all your hopes off of, and the frustration when they don't.

My dad taught me how to play, off a crappy plastic set we would set up on lawns and beaches.
He bought a nicer set later that - thinking back on it now - I didn't really notice much, but I'm absolutely in love with now.
We do not play anymore, really. Not for any dramatic reason; I simply beat him without contest now. It isn't fun for either of us.

Not to imply I'm an excellent chess player, by any means.
When I went to Seattle, I met a youthful erubescent erudite. We played in tiny stupid coffee shops, as befits stupid college students, and he actually knew moves, gambits, this bullshit rule about diagonal pawn capturing or something, who knows, and had specific strategies.
He trounced me and it wasn't fun.

I'm going to talk about Super Smash Bro's now.

I'm about equally good at both. Which is to say, passable. Adequate. Capable of holding my own.
More importantly, I am skilled.
The Gamecube was the first system I actually owned, and SSB Melee was my late middle school/early high school...it was my introduction to playing videogames with people, really. My brother had the TV so we would cram into his room and play for hours - we being me, him, and any of his handful of friends who were surprisingly competent. I was the odd young one out, but I had an advantage in this area.

Playing mattered to me. To these teens it was a worthwhile distraction and an entertaining time, but to me it was an opportunity to prove my cleverness and equality as only a younger brother aims to among older boys.
Don't misunderstand me - I played videogames because they were fascinating and amazing. Denied them in my youth, I was raised to a feverish curiosity by the mere glimpse of a game on a distant TV set.
I want to make that clear. SEEING videogames got me EXCITED. I would literally hang outside my brothers window and spy on him playing Warcraft II.
I got in severe trouble for breaking my DOS computer when I loaded a game that I knew would make it crash just to play it anyway. TWICE.
It was some shitty platformer where you played an elemental girl thingy and if you hit this glowing thing you could turn into a phoenix?
But that was the point. If you hit this brown thing, you turned into a frog. It was wonderful, it was...potential. It was pure potential of experience, of finding things out and doing them.

So. Super Smash Brothers was my first console game, and I played it with such incredible fascination it sounds weird to talk about it now.
I would play single player, of course, but that isn't the heart of SSB.
I mean multiplayer, with four people and a few others shouting. Super Smash Brothers requires an audience. It is a spectator sport.
But I would play just as happily without anyone else, in "Practice" mode.
You could spawn any item, you could play any character against any number of others. You could adjust the camera, and most fascinating of all you could adjust time.
So I learned every character's moves, every items effects, every stage, every pokemon. And then I went back and did it again in slow motion.
I would literally watch my character lazily twirling through aerial attack chains like it was a....I don't know, a rare bird or something people find really fucking interesting.

The natural conclusion to this is to assume I became a whirling dervish of death with a controller in my hand and everyone bowed down in deference and wonderment.
FOR AN IDIOT THAT CONCLUSION IS I MEAN. Have you ever been a younger sibling to a host of older kids? You don't get to stay and play if you whip everyone at your stupid videogame. You get kicked out of the room and you have to go read a book or some lame shit. While you listen to them have fun.
So: You don't hone your skills to dominate the game. You learn everything so you can control it. So you can orchestrate a good show.
Maybe someone is lagging behind a bit. Help them. Discretely. Attack their enemies. Fumble an item into their hands.
Maybe someone is showing off and playing a weak character to brag.
What's more entertaining? If they get summarily pounded, or if they crush their foes with Jigglypuff anyway? What makes for a better story?

In the end it always came down to my brother and I, of course. excuse me while I wax poetic about vidyagames. you come here for this, you know it
We would duel. We had special rules.
Super sudden death so the first blow ended it.
Ninety nine lives so we could try everything we knew.
A versatile stage. Medium items. Nothing overpowered.
Final Destination is a fucking boring map. It's like saying "okay, lets play chess. No bishops." You're all fucking stupid.
He would be Roy, I would be Marth. Of course.

It was satisfying. Incredibly so. Dodging around, shielding, feinting, dodging down. Air dodging. Catching items.
We were good. Your thumbs would get sore.
But we weren't excellent, not at all.
Competition SSB is nothing like what we played. Competitions aren't games.
I looked up some stuff once, later, on the interbutts.
Forums were full of acronyms for move combos. Full of super-wave-dashing Samus tricks, full of using glitches as regular gameplay material as easily as B attacks.
It was technical to a fault, it was min-maxing in the very worst way.
This is why fighting gamers are incredibly boring to play after the first ten minutes of learning all the moves.
They go about it all wrong. They memorize opening gambits and White-Queen-to-G9 and then they go out and either crush unknowing rabble instantly or end up spending ten minutes of furious standing around cancelling each others moves out.
It isn't a game, it's a travesty.

I can say this with conviction because I've seen true super smash bros. I've been a part of its magic, at the holy mecca of smash bros essence.

Caleb's parties.

It's fucking rare, it's fucking beautiful, and it's the best example I can give of Smash Bros done right: The Dorf
Does he give a fuck about winning? Absolutely not. Does he often win? Yes. Is it by the skin of his ass? Yes. Does that make it all the more magnificent? YES.
Caleb's Drunken Ganondorf is legendary.
Let me tell you why.
A) It takes skill. Truthfully. He is the slowest, strongest character in the game, to a point of absurdity. You cannot hope to hit your opponent. Like, ever. So what do you do? It's very zen. Punch where your opponent will be. Caleb will charge up a fucking insane corkscrew haymaker of dark energy facing entirely the wrong direction, and Mr Clever Dick will dodge right into it and get his teeth punched out his kneecap.
B) It's utterly natural and unforced. It isn't ever about "hey, look what I can do" or "let me do this". The Dorf is merely one element of the greater game, and so has a place and time. Hell, he doesn't even do it most games.
C) It's indicative that he understands the true way of the game. He knows what its for: Entertainment. For everyone, not just the four playing. So he Russel Crowes it up and gives it to them. Whether they want it or not. Fantastic recoveries. Incredible throws. Solid fucking beatdowns and hilarious beatings. Noble deaths. Shows of dexterity, of skill, and of effort. Spectacular failures, more often than not.

That is what group videogames are about. Stupid things done with skill and grace. Astonishing things accomplished accidentally.
That is what you hear people talk about later, when the subject comes up. That is what people remember.

So that is my goal!

But here....nobody knows how to play chess.
It is disheartening. But there are some exceptions.
I will talk of them later.

Straight Heat/Hate Street

I'd put this on the Ear, but I recently had a Glitch Mob feature already and it seems too jarring to put anywhere else.


I dunno. The whole Drink the Sea album is really fantastic ambient music. It is fire-flinging music again. Music for walking and staring at people, daring reality to crack for one minute so you can unleash your life force as a wave of blinding heat and lightning.


Holy shit you guys have I told you about MSPaint Adventures?
I feel like I should become a Homestuck Witness and go door to door, spreading the good news.
I feel that kind of burning urgency.

Muse muse muse muse muse muse muse.

Steel true. Blade straight.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.

-Ranier Maria Rilke
Letters To A Young Poet
Letter Eight (12 August 1904)

fire-brandisher of blizzard of ogress of protection-moon of steed of boat-shed

Greetings, programs.

Cataclysm has breathed new live into WoW, using a metaphor that seems strange at first but reveals itself to be perfect when you stop and think about it.

The Buddhists had it wrong, you know. The concept of the Bodhisattva. It doesn't work like that, not anymore.

Know that this, this beam to you, this gold-plated record affixed to the satellite, comes via herculean effort on my part.

This is building the mental equivalent of lactic acid. Tendons are tearing.

The old saying.

Mothers, soft soccer moms, have been known to lift entire city buses to reach their crushed children.

The Ulfheðnar of Norse legend - those 'tasters of blood', those eaters of fire and metal, those consumed by berserkergang.

Was it real, you wonder.

Does that matter, I wonder.

Someone said it was so.

Note that the same attributes (see: the lifting of city buses) have also been associated with those on crack.

Note most importantly that the soccer mom story, the only modern version we have, fails to note the all-important last page of the tale - the one that gives it weight, gives it a humanconditionaftertaste.

Maybe real people can do such things. Maybe they have.
Maybe we should believe these stories again.
That's not the point.

The point is we have forgotten that berserkergang burns you up from the inside out.

We have remembered Odin's blessing, learned thermodynamics, and forgotten the cost.

Or have we embellished old stories, pasteurized them, and forgotten the meaning.

Back to the Buddhists.

The Bodhisattvas with their bodhicittas. The Wisdom-Beings with their enlightenment-wish.

Those who walked the three score miles and ten to Babylon and, and this is important, came back to tell everyone else how.

This is important because it cannot happen.
I'm pretty sure last time that happened we crowned him, nailed him to a tree and pierced his side with a spear in the proper method of sacrifice for Goði Hrafnblóts, for Hangadróttinn, for Geirlöðnir Spear-Inviter Farmr-Galga All-Father God of the Raven Offering Lord of the Hanged Blind One-Eyed Two-Eyed Trickster Mad Screamer Wōden Wôdan Wuotan Wotan Óðr.

Or perhaps not. Maybe I tell a lie. That isn't how it went.

The reason the Bodhisattva concept cannot exist is because I refuse to believe anyone would willingly turn back.

Or rather that the act of going back wouldn't require so much effort as to incinerate you from the inside out, as to consume all of your energy and convert what remaining mass you had into more energy that still wouldn't be enough.

See. It all comes together.

Soccer moms and Odin and Bodhisattvas and crackheads and Berserkers and I.

You can either have your green on this side cake slice imagehope of the way things ought to be, or you can eat your green on that side pacman restofcake reality of the way things are.

Even this reaching burns so much.

Now open it, it's not sealed.

Use like, one finger.

Come on.

Willpower!

There is a special excitement that I've felt only rarely throughout my childhood that is specific to videogames.

Pokemon, usually. Pokemon, WoW, Mass Effect.

It is the excitement before you play the game. The excitement of planning, of theorycrafting, of imagining. It is better than the real game will ever be. It is the excitement of christmas contained on a chip.
It is potential, that urgent reassurance of future greatness that seizes your breastbone and jerks it several inches out in front of you, that worms into your mind and keeps you from falling asleep.

It invariably fades. It would be impossible to live in constant childlike frenzy, and whatever you end up doing pales in comparison to what you dreamed up the night before.

You will burn out at around level 30, a scant six levels before your starter reaches its third evolution, because by then you'll be bored. Your pokemon will languish in their respective boxes until you start again.

You WILL burn out around lvl 10, lvl 30, and lvl 50 because by then you'll have trained the majority of your workhorse spells and you'll be tired of running halfway through an instance with shitty PUGs. Your new troll druid will turn out to be exactly like the last druid you tried to roll.

You will get tired running around the Citadel for those damn Keepers a second or third time. The great spinning galaxies will lose their lustre, and your Engineer+ with Sniper Rifles will become tedious.

But it's okay, because later on you'll get that old feeling again, that physical tightening around your lungs and the fire up your brain stem.

It will come again. It is cyclical.

In time you find out that most things are.

But not enlightenment. By its very design, it hates circles.




.....so how do I explain 円相?

RS NAND Latch (Memory Cell)

The "About The Author" section in 1984 by George Orwell struck me with equal force as the book itself. I don't know what the traditional blurb is supposed to sound like. Usually you don't read them, you just look for the picture.

Terry Pratchett's says he used to work a million different jobs and likes banana daquiris.
Oscar Wilde's says he was flamboyant, brilliantly witty, and known for his splendid epigrams.

George Orwell's says he was a man of intense feelings and fierce hates.
He hated totalitarianism. He was critical of communism, but considered himself a socialist. He hated intellectuals, but was a literary critic. He hated cant and lying and cruelty in life and in literature. He had the conviction that modern man was inadequate to cope with the demands of his history.


In the essay "Why I Write", Orwell lists "four great motives for writing" which he feels exist in every writer. He explains that all are present, but in different proportions, and also that these proportions vary from time to time. They are as follows:

1. Sheer egoism- Orwell argues that many people write simply to feel clever, to "be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups in childhood, etc." He says that this is a great motive, although most of humanity is not "acutely selfish", and that this motive exists mainly in younger writers. He also says that it exists more in serious writers than journalists, though serious writers are "less interested in money".

2. Aesthetic enthusiasm- Orwell explains that present in writing is the desire to make one's writing look and sound good, having "pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story." He says that this motive is "very feeble in a lot of writers" but still present in all works of writing.

3. Historical impulse- He sums this up by simply stating this motive is the "desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity."

4. Political purpose- Orwell writes that "no book is genuinely free from political bias", and further explains that this motive is used very commonly in all forms of writing in the broadest sense, citing a "desire to push the world in a certain direction" in every person. He concludes by saying that "the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude."


In other news, the new pokemon suck. They all look the same, they're all angular and inorganic and composed of flat, rounded shapes. The legendaries are overpopulated and indistinguishable and meaningless.
There are hardly any new shapes - it as if the previous generation was disassembled into lego parts, recolored, and built again into a new 150.

I will still buy White. The day I don't buy the new pokemon will be a very different day indeed.