MSF: The Beloved Student and the Dog Knight

The Beloved Student was traveling by long and lonesome road when they happened upon a man clad in rags and lying in a ditch. Moved with compassion, the Beloved Student went to offer him the cloak from their shoulders, only for the man to spring up and away from their hand, spitting and snarling as an angry dog.

Startled, the Beloved Student drew back and exclaimed:

"What are you - a man who lives as a beast, or a beast that wears the guise of a man?"

"A reminder," the man growled in the voice like woodsmoke and firewater. As he emerged from the shade of the ditch to the light of the road, he picked up a sword from the dirt at his feet and brandished it as if it were a revelation: its tip was broken off; its edge was chipped and blunted; a great crack ran down its length; its corroded blade was caked in blood and dirt and the filth of men's bowels.

"Behold, my trade."

This sign the Student recognized, and they said:

"Ah! You are a kapalika, then."

"As good a name as any," the beggar said as he hung the sword from a loop of his fraying rope belt. "What do they say of me and my brethren, back in the green and peaceful lands?"

"That a kapalika might fight a thousand men alone and unclad and emerge victorious."

"Ah." The beggar crouched down and began writing something in the dirt. "Whoever told you that is either a liar or an idiot."

"Do you mean to say that you killed ten thousand?"

"I mean to say that I have no reason to count anything beyond what my fingers might provide. I am a slaughterer of men, ought I keep score like a boy playing kickball? Whether I killed a thousand or ten thousand or merely ten is of no difference to me."

"Oh."

The beggar stood back up, his knees cracking. He scuffed out what he had drawn with his tattered sandal.

[What he drew in the dirt is a matter of intense scholarly debate - ed.]

"I can see the question on your face. Best get it over with."

"While I recognize your trade, I do not know what reminder you make of yourself."

At this the beggar barked once in what was not unlike laughter, and phlegm caught in his throat so that he spat it into the dust before speaking further.

"You have gone out into the world to teach the ways of compassion and the paths of peace. I have gone out to preach the Sword Law to those who have forgotten its precepts."

"What is this Sword Law, that men so easily forget it?"

"The principle act of power is this: to shove a sharp piece of metal in the guts of another man. Dominion is made and sustained through mastery of the application of death and the manufacture of corpses. Kings and princes will name it glory and honor and duty, they will say it is a matter of law, of rights, of faith and of necessity. They will name it a thousand beautiful names, hide its gaping and maggoty wounds with silken robes, shower it in perfumes to mask the abattoir stench, drown its ghosts in wine, raise banners in honor and sing hymns of praise...but Sword Law does not change. It is the blade itself. Those princes and kings will wave from their palanquins and pavilions and think all costs justified. They have rejected the manudûn and chosen to live by the sword; Thus they shall die not as men die, comfortable in the house of their kin, but as disciples of the sword die. I am the reminder of true Sword Law, and thus I butcher men without sparing them the dignity I grant the rats that are my supper."

"Your law is a brutal and wretched thing," said the Beloved Student.

"Would you consider the killing of men to be anything else? Come now. But it is good that you are disgusted. Your soul remains intact. You need not be worried: My sword is for the humbling of hypocrites - the innocents learning by your side have nothing to fear from me." He grinned, revealing crooked and blackened teeth. "So long as they remember."

"I do not think you would be easy to forget."

"And yet, men so often do." He reached to an inner pocket of his dirt-caked robe and withdrew a small stoppered gourd from within. He removed the cork and there was the burning smell of gâzolin. He downed the mouthful, hissed with an intake of breath, and tossed the empty gourd aside.

"I will give you a proverb, in remembrance of this meeting: there is no mastery of the sword. It will destroy all you hold dear should you take to its teachings, and then it will destroy you. Do not think as kings and imbeciles do, that you are immune to the blade because you know the proper forms of its use. Hate the sword if you must have anything to do with it; it will still destroy you, but perhaps it might not become your master."

Silence reigned for a time, for the beggar had nothing more to say and the Beloved Student had no response. But they recovered their words and as the beggar made move to leave they said:

"A last question, sir. Who shall I say sent this message?"

The beggar smiled again, wider and more horrible than before. His gums bled.

"Tell them you heard it from a wild dog along the road. A jackal or dhole would do nicely."

And so the beggar walked past the Beloved Student, north on the road. When he had gone a stone's throw and a half, he turned and called back:

"A word to the wise, be it you or another: if you are to continue south, do so by a different road. This one has become difficult to pass."

With that the beggar staggered off the road and up the western hill, until at last he was out of sight. The Beloved Student watched him go before turning around northward and retracing their path back to the last crossroads.

Not far along that same road, a parasang or so south from that meeting place, crows gathered council in great black clouds. They settled upon the fields like a dew, alighting on new-formed hills of meat piled high and left to rot. Armor glistened under crusted gore, and banners hung limp beneath the burning sun.

** Notes**

[1] I'm not even reading Kill Six Billion Demons at the moment, I have no idea what the current arc is about other than Maya is involved.

[2] Dog Knights started as expys of Maya, but they've since accumulated traits of Sufi sword-saints (thanks Ènziramire!) and aghori.

[3] The Beloved Student's main appeal as a character and as a saint of the Painted Ones is their persistant gormlessness. They are naive, unaware, unimaginative, lacking in focus, and altogether somewhat of a dunce. They are the living embodiment of "bless their heart". But, the thinking goes, if this dunderhead can ascend the mountain, then the way is possible to anyone. To this end they feature often in comedic stories, and very often those geared towards children, and are always played off of someone more worldly and experienced - usually their teacher Jizo, but this is not the only encounter they will have with a Dog Knight.

[4] Dog Knights appear occasionally in the oral corpus, though they are rarely ever named - if they are, they will be called Jackal or Dhole or Hound or Hyena or Thylacine or something of that nature. This leads to them forming a sort of gestalt character, where every Dog Knight is treated as an aspect of a single, continuous personage. One might say that a Dog Knight appeared or the Dog Knight appeared and there is no real difference.

[5] Dog Knights, as evidenced in this story and in stories like it, inhabit the role of the of an opposite to the Painted Ones - not as opponents, but as a separate dharma entirely [aside] I can't think of a better way to describe this at the moment, we are brushing up agaist some rather obtuse in-universe philosophical and spiritual principles and I don't have a word of my own creation on-hand to describe "one of multiple simultaneous methodologies of achieving an enlightened spiritual state", so dharma it will remain for the time being. [/aside]

[6] Painted Ones are MSF's boddhisatva-analogues (hardly even subtle ones, the most prominent of them is name Jizo) We'll get more of them in the future: All you need to know now is that the name comes from the usage of body paints as a signifier of their role. There's also some definite influence from Sonchin in Hellboy/BPRD. You can consider the Dog Knights to be the left-hand to the Painted Ones' right, but the way that is typically framed in the world of MSF is more cooprative than combative.

[7] Some of the traditions that use the hand-path schema have upwards of a dozen of them - imagine a statue of Lu with the Hindu deity multiple-arm thing going on, each implement or hand sign representative of a different magical tradition. But again this is an in-universe way of looking at things. Everything is canon, especially the parts that contradict.

 

5 Forgotten Fictional Fantasy Novels

Your local Book Club Witch is back in town, let's see what she's got on offer.

 1. The Lion's Banner (1948)

After his death, a critic called Edward "Ed" Marsh "America's forgotten Tolkien" - a title Marsh would have rejected, but not an entirely untrue one. The Lion's Banner and its sequel (Last Campaign of the Lion's Banner) are accounts of a mercenary company inspired by the author's experience as an infantryman during the the Italian theater of World War II - some characters, scenarios, and dialogues are, according to Marsh, 1:1 translations of reality. The world of the novel is a loosely sketched fantasy Mediterranean in the wake of an imperial collapse, drawing many elements from Greco-Roman myth and history (down to a wildly popular messianic cult emerging in the background) and occasionally interrupted by incursions of alien and incomprehensible powers. The narrative points of view are universally either footsoldiers or camp followers - the kings and generals leading the Thousand-Crown War are portrayed as distant and inscrutable beings, even further removed from common humanity than the gods. This, along with other socially-aware elements uncommon (but not unheard of) for the time period have fueled a small but devoted modern following. 

2. Durac the Swordsman, Hero of Zaag (1976)

At first glance, it is a pornographic pastiche of the John Carter series. Closer reading reveals a rather brutal personal reflection on loss, addiction, mortality, and the failures of the counter-culture movement. Both Durac and the Zaaganian princess Moroque are trapped in self-destructive spirals of their own making; while the warlord is defeated, the protagonists' futures do not look particularly bright or lengthy by the end of the book.

Critical analysis of the book tends to put a great focus on the life of author John Duke. Duke's wife had committed suicide in 1973 and this was the source of much of the nihilism in Durac and its three sequels. It also accelerated Duke's already-severe alcoholism, which would lead to his own death in 1981. 

3. The Bloody Pearl (1926)

A rip-roaring pulp pirate adventure starring Siobhan O'Toole, Terror of the Crown, in her quest for treasure and revenge across the Caribbean. Written by schoolteacher Mary Hammet under a pseudonym, the book has frequently found itself challenged or banned due to its depictions of sexuality, violence, and unladylike behavior. It was most often challenged because of the interracial relationship between O'Toole and her longtime rival/friend Jean d'Capiteur. These challenges eventually escalated to a 1951 obscenity trial in which Hammet was forced to reveal her identity as the author. The trial did not go in her favor (she was declared in contempt of court for her combative responses to the prosecution and refusal to recant her statements) and as a result she was effectively blacklisted from publishing for the rest of her life. In her later years, she devoted herself as an ally of the civil rights movement (following in the footsteps of her abolitionist grandmother), participating in marches up through 1963 mere months before her death at the age of 85. As copyright was not renewed for The Bloody Pearl and the other Siobhan O'Toole novels, they were unaffected by the 1976 Extension Act and fell into public domain in the mid to late 50s, but have only recently had a resurgence in popularity thanks to efforts of Hammet's great-grandson.

 

 

4. And the Birds Cry Havoc (2007)

An early exemplar of the modern queer body horror and splatterpunk genres, And the Birds Cry Havok was published online in irregular serial installments beginning in June of 2007. Its grotesque, dreamlike, and chronologically asynchronous narrative details the incursions of "teratomatic space" into our world and the resulting influence of a decadent and brutal "meat-fascist" state.

While the story gained a small and devoted following, updates stopped without explanation in October of 2009, leaving the story unfinished midway through the fourth of five acts. Communication with the already-reclusive author gunkbird also ceased at this point, and episodes of dedicated sleuthing turned up nothing. The website ceased operating in 2012, and with only partial coverage on Internet Archive the story was thought lost until a reader stepped forward with a self-compiled pdf copy. The fan community, including several of the "sludgies" (earliest adopters) later produced a version with better formatting, commentary essays and art, which is available on multiple storefronts as a pay-what-you want purchase, with proceeds going to organizations serving at-risk queer youth.

 

 

5. "The Saga of Eric" (2014-2019)

A glimmer of creative genius shining even in the depths of capital's all-devouring machine, the "Saga of Eric" would have gone completely unnoticed by the world were it not for a stray Reddit post pointing out the apparent continuity between two commercials for BKO Insurance. Smelling a treasure hunt, a small community formed around these hidden links and visual gags, and swiftly pieced together that there was indeed a meaningful narrative beneath the bizarre non-sequitors and inane advertising tag lines. As theories gained footing and new commercials aired, the sleuths pieced together the outline of a greater narrative of Eric (the everyman spokescharacter)'s life. Over the course of the commercial series (told anachronistically), we see Eric struggle through the loss of his job, the collapse of his toxic codependent marriage, his brother's cancer diagnosis, a backpacking pilgrimage through Europe, the rescue of his son from online radicalization, and his relationship and eventual (much healthier) marriage to his second wife, all interlaced with alchemical imagery building towards the Magnum Opus.

BKO insurance was bought out in 2019 and the Eric commercial series was shuttered. No one has come forward to claim responsibility for writing them.

Wiktionary has an archive of non-English words of the day. I was bored one evening and started going through at random, pulling out some of my favorites. Might as well make a random table.

Since these are all trawled from Wiktionary, apply some salt as you deem necessary. Turns out if the language uses a non-latin alphabet it is very difficult to find an entry again after you lose the link so I might be missing some of the diacritics.

100 Good Words

    1. -pháka (v): 1) to serve food 2) to distribute, allot (Zulu)
    2. āghāya (n): n) killing, striking, stroke, blow (Prakit)
    3. ahava (n): 1) cold wind 2) weather-beaten skin (Finnish)
    4. ajatasten Tonava (n): "Danube of Thought"; person with many pointless thoughts (Finnish)
    5. àlmājirī (n): 1) student, often itinerant 2) beggar (Hausa)
    6. āltepētenāncoyoctli (n): small gate in a city wall (Classic Nahuatl)
    7. amiqui (v): to die of thirst; to be thirsty; to drown (Nahuatl)
    8. ana-baci (n): 1) mother and sister 2) a man's sense of honor (Azerbaijani)
    9. anniskelu (n): the serving of alcohol 2) saloon, pub (archaic) (Finnish)
    10. apenrots (n): 1) a rock on which monkeys live 2) a silly hierarchical environment (Dutch)
    11. armentum (n): draft animal suitable for a plow (Latin)
    12. åskblå (adj): dark grey-blue, as a thunderstorm sky (Swedish)
    13. atakanar (v): to fix, to repair 2) (reflexive) to dress up (Ladino)
    14. auzhandil (n): morning star, Venus (Gothic)
    15. avoda (v): 1) worship, service 2) work, job, labor (Hebrew)
    16. ayiq (adj): 1) sober 2) conscious, awake 3) vigilant (Azerbaijani)
    17. ayni (n): community work, mutual aid; solidarity (Quechua)
    18. bacōnālis (adj): fit for bacon (Latin)
    19. blāc (adj): pale, shining, white (Old English)
    20. boia (n): 1) executioner 2) hangman (game) 3) scoundrel, villain (Italian)
    21. borken (v): 1) to bark 2) to grumble or whine 3) to complain or insult (Middle English)
    22. bplòt-ɛ̀ɛk (v): to liberate from oppression, or servitude. Lit.”to remove the yoke” (Thai)
    23. buraxmaq (v): to let go; to release; to let; to leave; to publish; to let through (Azerbaijani)
    24. chronophage (adj): time-consuming (French)
    25. chumbo (n): 1) lead 2) shot, pellet 3) failure 4) rejection (Portugeuse)
    26. cindṑ (n): someone with six fingers on each hand (Hausa)
    27. csufnev (n): unflattering nickname based on a characteristic or event (Hungarian)
    28. dabbaja (v): 1) adorn, deck out, embellish 2) to express splendidly (Arabic)
    29. diskabresta (v): to lose self-control (Kabuverdianu)
    30. djodjomano'o (v): you (several creatures) shut your eyes (Tonkawa)
    31. dodo (n): 1) being a deep, rich red 2) fried plantain (Yoruba)
    32. dvärgalåt (n): petty, unmotivated criticism (Swedish)
    33. dygna (v): to stay awake for 24 hours (Swedish)
    34. dzjákuj (int): thank you, thanks (Belarusan)
    35. gaduji (adj/n): adj) all together n) collective labor (Cherokee)
    36. gadzinówka (n): local-language newspaper serving an occupying force (Polish)
    37. gallicinium (n): time of early morning when roosters crow (Latin)
    38. gatarî (n): 1) a multitude of cats 2) a long meow (Emilian)
    39. Gedankenwelt (n): the world of ideas (German)
    40. glodomór (n): one who is constantly hungry; one who is starving (Polish)
    41. hero hero (n): red, crimson (Rapa Nui)
    42. ḥina'iḏin (adv): then, at that time (Arabic)
    43. hoyreg (n): murder victim; corpse (Yiddish)
    44. hranrād (n): "whale road"; poetic kenning for the ocean (Old English)
    45. ikara (v): 1) to sit 2) to stay / remain 3) to dwell (Kikuyu)
    46. ixuxu (int): 1) battle cry or challenge 2) cry of joy or excitement (Asturian)
    47. jǐngdǐzhiwā (n): person of limited life experience; (Modern Standard Chinese)
    48. kagiroi (n): 1) heat haze (archaic) 2) the glow of dawn (archaic) (Japanese)
    49. karadaki (n): heating empty cookware (forgetting to fill the kettle, etc) (Japanese)
    50. kokolares (n): nonsense, balderdash, gibberish (German)
    51. krāntikāri (n): a revolutionary (Hindi)
    52. kulukulu (n): 1) the smell of raw meat or fish (Saetomense)
    53. kümütüdi (n): termite nest in which the placenta of a newborn is buried (Maquiritari)
    54. lankous (n): familial relationship to spouse's brother (Finnish)
    55. ling-lôot (v): "monkey-jumping"; to be overjoyed (Thai)
    56. lletraferit (adj/n): adj) well-read, bookish n) book-lover, "book-smitten" (Catalan)
    57. lodikor (adj): likely or tending to become fat (Basque)
    58. lyard (adj): having dappled grey and white spots (Middle English)
    59. madro (n): peace or silence after a meal (Danish)
    60. malandrar (v): 1) to get by at others' expense 2) to do nothing productive (Portuguese)
    61. malaya (int): expression of annoyance or unpleasant surprise (Asturian)
    62. manželée (n): married couple (Czech)
    63. marambaia (n): landlubber (Portuguese)
    64. matasanos (n): quack doctor (Spanish)
    65. māyā (n): 1) art, wisdom, inhuman/supernatural power (Vedic Sanskrit)
    66. mimochodem (adj): 1) by the way 2) en passant (Chess move) (Czech)
    67. mnkhwani (n): pumpkin-leaf relish (Chichewa)
    68. mokutō (n): 1) a silent prayer 2) to offer such (Japanese)
    69. nekás (n): 1) pile of corpses 2) line of soldiers 3) the dead (Ancient Greek)
    70. nunu (conj): now then, therefore, consequently (Gothic)
    71. nyan (v): to see vaguely (Abau)
    72. ouranóthen (adv): from heaven (Ancient Greek)
    73. panero (n): someone who loves bread (Spanish)
    74. pāngtuó (adj): 1) of rain, torrential 2) of tears, streaming, 3) vast, plentiful (Chinese)
    75. pāthnā (v): to press cakes out of dung (Hindi)
    76. pekoral (n): a text written in a pompous, grandiose, ridiculous style (Swedish)
    77. pócima (n): potion (Spanish)
    78. pruikentijd (n): "Wig Era" - humorous/informal/pejorative name for 18th century (Dutch)
    79. śaraṇārthi (n): 1) suppliant, petitioner 2) refugee (Sanskrit)
    80. sbarazzino (adj/n): adj) impish, cheeky, mischevous n) scamp, imp (Italian)
    81. sebu (n): used-media store (Brazilian Portuguese)
    82. shashimamishi (adv): haughtily, arrogantly (Swahili)
    83. shilah (n): 1) Elder sibling of opposite gender 2) maternal cousin (Navajo)
    84. sôtôrôkôm (adj): "hundred-fold" (Bengali)
    85. suppēdō (v): “I fart quietly” (Latin)
    86. tabanka (n): performance of theft of a saint (represented by a flag). (Kabuverdianu)
    87. ṭaqs (n): 1) weather, climate, forcast 2) religious rite (usually in plural) (Arabic)
    88. tausi (n): a grand, a thousand Euros (slang) (German)
    89. teōpixqui (n): priest, lit. “god-guarder” (Classical Nahuatl)
    90. thokar (n): 1) striking an object with the toe 2) loss, injury, damage (Gujurati)
    91. tlīlātl (n): abyss; deep water; ritual healing water of Ixtiliton (Classical Nahuatl)
    92. tsindn (v): to light, to kindle (Yiddish)
    93. ūhtcearu (n): pre-dawn anxiety (Old English)
    94. ungkeurida (v): 1) to crouch 2) to exist in a suppressed or hidden state. (Korean)
    95. valtr (adj): easily upset; unstable, unsteady (Icelandic)
    96. xalāsi (n): 1) railroad worker 2) dockyard worker 3) menial fisherman (Hindi)
    97. xìyǎn (n): most interesting part of an opera or film (Modern Standard Chinese)
    98. yibatha (n): a female marriage class / skin group (Gamilaraay)
    99. žāč̣ă (n): beard (Adyghe)
    100. zamordyzm (n): authoritarianism (informal, derogatory) (Polish)

Slush Pile 14: Scrapped Posts

Since it's only been two months since the last slush post, this one is a bit different: instead of a nice list of notebook ephemera, it's going to be a post-mortem on some posts I have scrapped in the name of early summer cleaning. Need to get things moving the draft doc has been hovering around 30,000 words for months now.

Slushpile Index

Into the Trash Pit With Ye!

**

Scrap Post 1: Making a Better Toki Pona

 

I don't like Toki Pona all that much, and had floated the idea of either re-doing the vocabulary via direct crafting or sound change into something more varied and interesting, perhaps adding more complex grammar later.

Reason to Scrap It: Well, I don't like Toki Pona to begin with, why am I wasting the time and effort trying to make it something better when I can just start with something I do like and make that better?

Also, every single resource for sound changes out there is severely deficient in one critical area, and it's a different feature that's missing in each one. Incredibly aggravating and also something no one else would care about (and for good reason). I still want to do something with diachronics, but it will be with some other source language. If I can ever find an actually useful resource for stupid sound changes.

 

 

Scrap Post 2: Implied Class Politics in Dungeoncrawling

 

A lengthy post starting with the premise "A fighter, a thief, a wizard, and a cleric delve deep into ancient, monster-filled ruins in search of treasure." and spinning it out into a full implied setting of a collapsing imperialist power economically exhausted by forever-war against its neighbors. Fighters are veterans that were never able to re-integrate into society after the war, thieves are emblematic of widespread organized crime filling the power vacuums left be a weakened centralized state, wizards are specialized remnants of the war machine now finding that there are far more wizards out there than there are jobs for wizards now that the war's done, and clerics are there specifically to put the undead (caused by generations of forever war) back to rest at the behest of some major organized religion or another.

Reason to Scrap It: Honestly, I don't give enough of a shit about Generic Vernacular Dungeoncrawling to write out a Marcia-style critical analysis, especially when the end result is going to be "It's a successor state to not-Rome, that looks a whole lot like not-America when you squint at it." There's nothing novel or new there, and so the entire exegeitic exercise, no matter now fun to daydream about, is spinning wheels and wasting pagecount.

If I'm going to do it, I should actually do something with the concept instead of just navel-gazing. It's good flavor, but no one's going to call a pot full of only paprika good cooking.

 

Scrap Post 3: The Good Parts of 60 Years in Space

As is my custom, I over-promised and under-delivered. Not for lack of trying, but eventually I had to get delete the drafts for my own sanity. I had some tables, some loosely sketched factions, a history of the solar system, all junked.

Reason to Scrap It: These books are unusable - not even the cocktail of hyperfocus, sunk cost fallacy, and white-whale chasing could squeeze something directly usable from these books. It was quite obvious that I was only going to make myself stressed and miserable trying to make it work, so I had to pull the plug.

I did have a personal revelation that, in these cases where I become hyper-fixated on games that I like conceptually but strongly dislike otherwise, comes from subconsciously compensating my own executive dysfunction by latching onto something where the executive functions and most of the legwork is already taken care of by someone else.

(God, of the Three White Whales, why do the ones that actually have stuff to work with have no 3rd party license while Eclipse Phase has CC but so little to work with.)

 

Scrap Post 4: The Longest Night Compilation

The Longest Night is a mod for Dwarf Fortress taking place in the nightmarish transhuman future and it's got a lot of really cool flavor tucked away inside of it. I wanted to do a compilation of monsters and posthuman clades and whatnot, which only got as far as a bit of copy-pasting descriptions from the entity files.

Reason to Scrap It: Low payoff for considerable effort in copying-compiling-cleaning the data.

 

Scrap Post 5: A Terrible Mass Effect Theory

Thesis: the ardat-yakshi condition is the result of inbreeding. Asari are an extremely long-lived, low-population species with generation-overlapping childbearing periods (high consanguinuity risk), culturally and potentially biologically reinforced exogamy (most effective means of preventing consanguine relations), and consider the ardat-yakshi condition so culturally shameful that its existence is hidden from the greater galactic community and anyone known to have the condition is either sequestered in a monastery for the rest of their life or hunted down and killed (response would be overkill for a congenital condition unless there was an unspoken factor at play.)

Reason to Scrap It: I have written it, the idea is exorcised. Also since we don't know the extent of the prothean uplift project this theory is rather tenuous and I'm certain the writers at Bioware were not thinking of this implication when writing ME2.

 

 

Scrap Post 6: Gazu Hyakki Yagyo Translation

 

The Gazu Hyakki Yagyo (Night Parade of a Hundred Demons) by Toriyama Sekien is an illustrated bestiary of yokai first published in 1776 and that's the post. It's a big four-volume list of spookums and a fine resource for any referee, but while digging through the wikipedia pages I got to thinking about its value as a work-in-translation. Translation in the sense of keeping the same concept but altering the name and appearance and the externalities to put it in a new context. The same book with different faces, different cultural milieus and environments. I can imagine versions adapted to the ancient Mediterranean, to Appalachia, to deep space, and so on. I'd written down a list of all the yokai in the first two volumes, started going through the kanji of their names to make literal translations first and then thematic ones later, but it never really went anywhere. 

 

Reason to Scrap It: Frees up cognitive load. The Muse arrived, and then departed, don't have the drive for sitting down with Wiktionary right now. Maybe I'll come back to it, whip up Yokai of the High Frontier

Bookpost 12

Bookpost Index

The Hall of the Mountain King, Judith Tarr

DNF 94/238

I grabbed this in an omnibus for two bucks at a library book sale, and I feel somewhat bad about dropping it - it is Fine Enough epic fantasy, but it is very, very much of its time (1986, specifically), and while it has no crippling flaws it is a very slow, heavy work - the omnibus pages are bigger than standard and the print is small, so those 94 pages are probably closer to 130-150 standard and just...not a lot has happened. The setup is good, in a classic sense - king whose daughter (and heir) has been missing for years is revealed to have died, with her demigod son via the sun-god delivering the news. The king's other child by a second wife is not pleased with this, nor is his mother. Classic stuff, evil jealous uncles and their sorcerous mothers. Not too big a fan of the rather uncomplicated cosmology (sun = good and masculine, dark = bad and feminine), and if it gets subverted later on I don't know. The prince is fun in the "young character who knows more than they should and uses that to freak out / mess with other people" sort of way. It was significantly more homoerotic than I was expecting (granted, I had no expectations at all going in, having never heard of the author or the book.)

It was a very interesting look into the mists of the past and books that have been forgotten, but my ADHD-addled and novelty-seeking brain couldn't find the space for it. 

 

Children of Memory, Adrian Tchaikovsky

HE'S DONE IT AGAIN, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. Where even to begin? I'm awed by his deft handling of high concepts, his unwillingness to leave behind the close-to-home and the human elements, his ability to craft a good sentence. Children of Memory builds on its predecessors in the way all good sequels do, and he has managed to increase the scope without pigeonholing himself into a game of one-upmanship - I'd love to see a novella collection of other colony worlds and their unique stories (I appreciate that so much in this series - every planet is unique in its existential circumstances and that uniqueness makes reading about the ins and outs of terraforming mightily interesting.)

As in the other books, he can take well-trod conceptual ground and make it new and fresh again, and that is a skill often overlooked.

Skerples has said that, if this series had been released 20 years ago he would be considered a revolutionary figure in sci-fi. Certainly, the timeline where he takes off in place of Alastair Reynolds is one that is, in one small way, perhaps a little brighter.

 

Always Coming Home, Ursula K. LeGuin

Ongoing

What can I say? LeGuin's work, as always, is a beacon of calm in a chaotic world. I will have more to say in the future, for I have not finished it yet: This is a book that I need to get a copy of my own - it's not something I can just read through all at once. I go and then leave and then come back to read more.

The book is a fantastic and lived-in portrait of a people that has never existed. It feels a disservice to call it worldbuilding, it is so much more vibrant and alive than so much of spec-fic. It is LeGuin at her most LeGuin. The people and the place may exist only in the mind but in the eye of my imagination I can see the scrub hills, the morning mists, the dappled shade. Down in the valley, I can hear a distant drum and the sounds of the people singing heya...

No recommendation higher.

 

The Lady Who Picked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen's Window, Rachel Swirsky

A novella about a sorceress whose spirit is bound to the land and is summoned over and over, witnessing the great changes over the centuries and millennia.

The concept is great, and the story is at its best when we see the glimpses of the radically different cultures our narrator finds herself summoned into. But it falls afoul of one extremely specific pet peeve of mine, which is that the story sticks us with a truly piece of shit character as our POV and doesn't give us any emotional catharsis via other characters responding to our POS POV in a similar way to how we the audience are feeling.

Context: Our sorceress POV is from a culture where women who bear children are called broods and treated like cattle and men, if they are spoken about at all, are considered a sort of feral animal. While this is somewhat effective at reinforcing the theme of dredging up old poisons and mistakenly thinking that "this time it will be different", it still traps us with Ms. "Waahhhhhhh wahhhhhhh wahhhh me me me how dare these people not let me practice my genocide-based spiritual heritage" without so much as an audience-sympathetic "Shut the fuck up" from another character.

Also the academy mage that summons the sorceress gets in a sexual relationship with said sorceress which I am certain is violating some sort of ethics policy of the academy and is certainly violating the basic logic of self-preservation and I while I normally will side on the "emotional repression is generally not a good thing", maybe repress the desire to fuck the genocidal slaveowner, eh? Not gonna work out well. Something something sudden but inevitable betrayal.

 

Move Underground, Nick Mamatas

Before reading this, I would have scoffed at the idea of Jack Kerouac serving as our narrator as Cthulhu rises from the sea and reality falls apart, but honestly he might be the best version of the Lovecraft protagonist. The self-destructive nihilism of the Beat poets, awash in psychotropics and misapplied Buddhism, is the perfect vessel for the grand cosmic horror; dripping with vivid colors, grotesque imagery, utterly disjointed contents and no plot to speak of. It is a dissolution into meaninglessness but, unlike the actual On the Road, it is used here to supplement the weaknesses of its other half, to provide to the Mythos what Lovecraft and his pastichers couldn't manage to do.

Honestly by halfway through I wasn't entirely convinced that anything in it was real. Were there ever to be a book to be revealed to be the hallucinations of a man dying in a ditch of drug overdose, this is the one.

Sometimes the pastiche falters and the modern touch reveals itself. Sometimes it becomes too pat, too sensible and coherent, especially in the last quarter - but on the whole it successfully walks the balancing act.

 

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

An excellent and entertaining look at the internet's influence on modern language and communication, and how those changes have shifted as social integration of the internet increased. If that piques your interest at all, track it down (and also listen to Lingthusiasm, which is more about linguistics in general and not necessarily about the internet). It's also nice to read about the internet from a POV that is of the very online, post Google pre-social media generation that I call home. Short review, so you know I liked it.

Tears of the Breath of the Kingdom of the Wild

I've beaten the Fire Temple and played enough otherwise to form some reasonably-supported opinions.

**

Tears of the Kingdom is like Breath of the Wild, but just slightly worse, such that the moments I'm having the most fun are those that are just replicating Breath of the Wild.

Note how those are moments, interspersed in the greater experience of playing the game. We'll come back to that.

**

Tears of the Kingdom is like Elden Ring, in the sense that there is a large, visually impressive open world to explore. It is absolutely nothing like Elden Ring in every other way, and I think it would be markedly improved if it was more like Elden Ring and less like itself.

**

Tears of the Kingdom is not a sequel to Breath of the Wild, because that would entail having some manner of narrative connection to the previous game. The locations are the same, some of the characters are the same, but it doesn't matter because the events of the first game have been memory-holed. Calamity Ganon is mentioned once (in my play time) in a character profile - even in the opening sequence the events of the first game simply aren't mentioned.

The Guardians, one of BotW's instantly recognizable aesthetic features - are gone. Shekiah technology is an afterthought, limited to the towers - different towers this time. The most continuity I've seen so far is Master Koga yelling at me for knocking him down a pit, and that's played as a joke. I don't even know how much time passes between the prologue and the start of the game, it feels like it could be anywhere from a few months to over a decade.

I am firm on my soapbox that the idea of a Zelda timeline is nonsense. There is no series less interested in continuity than this one. Even games with no continuity care more about it than Zelda, because at least those games don't pretend to care.

**

The story adds nothing to my enjoyment of the game, and is not worth inclusion in this review. I wasn't expecting Gene Wolfe, but if it's going to be such a barren narrative why is it here to begin with.

**

The opening sky island should get a prominent spot in the annals of bad tutorial levels: it's overly long, difficult to navigate, generally boring, and does not give you the glider, which is the most important item in the game.

**

I had to look up how to get the glider, because I was afraid that they had removed it and were going to force me to use zonai mechanisms as a replacement. Good thing I did, too, given how the glider is locked behind part of the main quest. Now, it's not like it's a long way into that quest, but in a game like this who the hell does the main quest first? They went and locked the most important part of the game, with no indication that it was there, behind something that most players will go out of their way to avoid considering the conventions of the genre. Absolutely mind-boggling.

**

The game gets a lot better once you get on the surface and start running around and exploring. This is the game at its best, when it is just you, some interesting thing in the distance, and the geography between you.

**

The lack of controller remapping is unacceptable. If your game is more complex than selecting things from a menu, it needs to have some way of remapping buttons. Especially when it decides to have a control scheme that bears no resemblance to any similar game on the market and a couple hundred hours of Elden Ring is a hell of a muscle memory to overcome.

**

For a game about running around and climbing on everything, it's impossible to do a running jump without having to form THE CLAW, because run and jump are mapped to bottom and top buttons.

Adding insult to wrist injury, you can swap the run and jump buttons - the only remap available in the game - which does nothing because it still means you have to use THE CLAW.

**

I like having wells and caves. While they don't really provide anything new they are an essential Zelda thematic element that was previously missing.

**

But there's no instrument to play, for a second game in a row, and that feels way out of whack. Especially for a game with so much environmental interaction, you'd think songs to change weather or time of day would be extremely valuable.

**

The new enemy selection remains pretty anemic: aerowanas, horriblins, boss bokoblins, like-likes and the hand-shoggoth, that's all I can name off the top of my head.

**

There's a very rare animation where Link will stub his toe while opening a treasure chest and my partner got it on her first one. It's a fun little gag, I'm glad it's there.

**

Back to controls, the Ultrahand controls poorly enough that, when combined with the intro sky island's dullness, I very nearly gave up then and there. The game wants you to precisely orient items in a 3 dimensional space and then gives you only two axes of rotation to do it. Awful, frustrating learning curve you have to bumble through before you learn the knack of orienting the object to yourself and then changing it from there to what you need in 45 degree intervals.

The fact that you are forced to wiggle the joystick to detach parts where there are THREE unused face buttons is ludicrous, though.

**

The Fuse power is honestly a pretty good way of making weapon degradation a worthwhile mechanic, because it means even trash weapons have some value.

Unfortunately actually using the damn thing is nothing but trouble, because Nintendo, in their great wisdom, saw fit to allow you to fuse something from your inventory by using a hotbar but only when using a bow. If you want to attach something to that sword in your hand, you have to open up the menu, scroll to the item, drop it on the ground, make sure you have Fuse active, use Fuse, and then select if it's going to your item or shield. Bow fusion is 3 button presses and a joystick scroll, while doing the same thing form your sword is at minimum 2 (if you have fuse already equipped and an item you want to fuse on the ground) often 4 buttons and a joystick scroll and very often 5/6 if you have to dump things out of your inventory and . It should be two presses and a scroll: One press to bring up the scroll bar, then another to fuse.

UI and UX so cumbersome that I will go out of my way to not interact with it, even if it makes the game harder for me. This will be a recurring theme.

**

The implication of "weapons are all corroded and shit now because resurrected Ganondorf has absorbed their cumulative ability to do violence" is so, so good. Gold star on that one.

**

Those koroks are going to stay stranded if it means one less opportunity to engage with the Ultrahand.

**

You still can't cook multiple meals at once, trade in multiple sets of shrine blessings at once, upgrade multiple pieces of armor at once, or unlock multiple korok seed rewards at once.

**

Combat is terrible. It was bad in BotW and it's worse here because they skewed the balance something fierce - you get one shot (or nearly one shot) by most enemies even hours and hours in. Attacks are poorly telegraphed, enemies rarely stagger, we still have no I-frames on that dodge, and armor is now both even rarer and more difficult to upgrade (the Great Fairies are now locked behind sidequests so if you don't stop in at the one specific stable you are shit out of luck without a guide).

Just give us a dodge with I-frames, I beg.

**

Looking at some online conversations, it seems that they changed from enemies scaling to your progress to specific difficulty tiers, which means that there is an intended path in Tears and that is garbagio. "Go do the dungeons in whatever order" was a highlight of Breath, and while it's still possible here, it's a right pain when the grand open world of "go where the heart desires" turns right around to say "but you REALLY should go to the Rito village first."

**

In both Tears and Breath I find myself dreading the major dungeons, because it means I'm going to be cut off from my favorite part of the game (Applied Geography) and stuck with annoying companion characters. The experience is never as bad as I fear, and thankfully the dungeons are visually different this time around, but I'd rather not have the annoying companion characters.

**

This series is in love with remixing elements of prior games but never the ones I personally want. How dare they not cater to my whims /s

For real though where's Midna. And the Minish. Bring back Kinstones you cowards. Stick the Twili in the underworld regions, they'd fit right in.

**

I actually do like exploring the underworld, despite how it is objectively pretty open and barren - those poe souls are all the excuse I need to keep exploring, because the easiest way to get someone playing a video game to engage with the video game is the means to acquire cool outfits. I like it more than the sky islands.

**

The tip of Rauru's nose looks like a little smile from some angles and it instantly voids any gravitas he might have had (he didn't have much to begin with, I don't like the design, the queen's is better)

**

I know that Japanese media really loves super advanced ancient civilizations, but we've literally already got one.

**

A tear-shaped stone possessed by someone who goes back in time to set up events that will have a cascading effect in the future is certainly not a Wolfe reference but I am having a hilarious time imagining that it is. Link as the alternate Severian, a man possessing no internal monologue whatsoever who also gallavants around the world with no thought to his own personal safety.

 

Damn. We'll never get that game.

**

Ah, my favorite character type; the intentionally-hideous, screeching, "funny" character. A bane upon them. But he gives me gear so I will endure it.

**

All my complaints taken into account, I am still playing the game, and I am still having fun. Not as much fun as with Breath, and not as much fun as a lot of other games that are not limited to Elden Ring. I have grown to tolerate many of the poor design choices, as I suspect I did back when I played Breath of the Wild. The luster has certainly worn off, even if Applied Geography is a gameplay loop you can't really get anywhere else.

I just wish it was attached to a better game.

Son of the Son of the Podcast Post

I can believe the last one was in 2019, I have listened to so many podcasts since then.

Except...honestly a lot of it is more of the same. If anything I've cut down on the number I listen to. Work from home for two years had a lot to do with it, what with being able to just have youtube running on my phone. Let's see...

Futility Closet is no longer running their podcast, great sadness is had. Apocrypals remains top of the charts. Pretending to Be People's second series is ongoing and pretty keen. I'll be leaving off most of the rest of the ones that I have mentioned before. Turnover is high, and I find myself often looking for new recs.

Midst

New weird space fantasy western and easily my favorite narrative podcast for its breakneck pace greek chorus narration style. Critical Role bought them out and they delayed the next season and took down the entire series to drip-feed it back out with ads and a paywall. I am saltier than the Dead Sea about it.

Uncanny Japan

Short episodes on Japanese folklore and ghost stories. Host has a very relaxed delivery, so it's good if you want something mellow to listen to.

The Redacted Reports

I am a picky bastard with actual plays, but I've binged over 100 episodes of RR in only a couple months so that certainly speaks for something. It's on the more serious side of the spectrum from PtbP, and on the well-produced axis across from RPPR's tabletop raws, which means it has a solid niche for itself.

Between Two Cairns

Yochai and Brad doing the good work of reviewing OSR / NSR / whatever-it's-called-now modules. Entertaining, good for recs, I vibrate with anticipation of any future Unicorn Meat episode.

Nobody Wake the Bugbear

Can't say anything about their D&D campaigns, but their Mothership APs are great fun and come highly recommended.

Conlangery

Niche content? Niche content! It's not particularly polished and I wouldn't necessarily call it a gem, but it can fill the niche and sometimes I get the itch.

(Aside: If you ever want a case study of how the internet has changed, listen to an amateur podcast that was running ten years ago and count how long it takes for casual r-slur drop. I am honestly quite glad that particular host left the show a very long time ago.)

Lingthusiasm

Now this one I will definitely recommend to all and sundry. Gretchen and Lauren are incredibly entertaining and knowledgeable hosts, and are able to present complex topics in a fun and easily-approachable manner. Gold star.

372 Pages We'll Never Get Back

Two of the Rifftrax guys read weird, often bad books. It's loads of fun and bound to add some very peculiar entries to your lexicon ("I, Titus Uno, Certified Public Accountant...")

Astronomy Cast

Short episodes, and whole lot of them. Good for a listen if you want some astronomy in your pod diet, I tend to drift in and out of listening to it as a palate cleanser or while doing lighter chores.

Monster Man

An entry-by-entry dive into the monster manuals of first and second edition D&D, with regular special episodes featuring monsters from further afield, collected by theme, topic, game, or source. A great resource both as a historical survey and useful advice.

Kill James Bond

Wherein the hosts watch all James Bond movies in chronological order and gradually lose their minds. Having caught up, they have expanded to other spy media such as the Bourne movies and a manic episode about Cars 2, a film that cannot be comprehended by mortal minds.

RTFM

I don't listen to it often, but they have good variety on the books they talk about and they tend to focus on the games themselves over adventures, and there are a whole lot of wonky games out there (if it tells you anything I saw there was an Eclipse Phase episode and immediately said "I will listen to this now.")

Tarnished Archaeologist

Cheating a bit and adding a youtube channel, but it's basically a podcast about Elden Ring lore through the lens of forensic archaeology and it is _fascinating_. Avoids the common pitfalls of the genre through brevity, integration of real-life historical analogs, and focus on material conditions as a major shaper of society and history. Was difficult going back to Vaati after this, honestly. Triple gold star.

Words for Granted

An NPR radio-show style podcast about language, fielding questions about odd pronunciations or the origins of figures of speech. Lots of callers sharing obscure figures of speech from their families. Not much structure or direction, but very good listening if you want to zone out while playing Zelda.