Blackmoor Vituperative

Warning: spoilers follow.

I wrote another 1,000 words on Spider Season over the last few days.

I have several ideas I want to get on paper before I forget them.

Rain goes to a village where a werewolf is chained up and is going to be killed. He says he is innocent of the crime he is accused of, and Rain believes him. She finds out who really did it and saves him. Or maybe he really did it but she finds out that he had good reason. Or maybe he’s an evil bastard and he deserves to die.

The iron ring acts as a barrier to magic. Not sure if it works both ways. Maybe she just can’t affect anyone else with magic while she wears it. That’s what the antagonist sorcerer really wants. Rain thinks he wants the magic book.

When Rain meets Scratch, he asks her to name him. The naming of something has great symbolic significance, he says. Scratch pretends to be her familiar, but really he is the familiar of the antagonist sorcerer the entire time. He’s a spy, or a double agent. At the end of the book he chooses to be Rain’s familiar. The antagonist sorcerer commands Scratch to do something — pick up the magic ring and bring it to him, maybe? — and calls him by the name that sorcerer gave him. Scratch walks over to the ring (or whatever), and says that XXX is not his name anymore. His name is Scratch. And he gives Rain the ring (or whatever).

It is Scratch that suggests that Rain goes to the Ivory Tower and ask for Subreiland’s help. This is a ruse to bring the ring to Subreiland. Does he send her on three pointless quests to prive her sincerity, or does his underling do that? Or maybe she goes through trials on the way there.

Intel’s lab in Pittsburgh, affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University, is showing off a technology concept at the Intel Developer Forum here this week called Dynamic Physical Rendering, which could ultimately lead to a shape-shifting fabric.

Apply the right voltage and software program and the flat piece of fabric turns into a 3D model of a car. Change those parameters and it transforms into a cube. Dynamic Physical Rendering has grown out of the ongoing Claytronics project headed up by CMU professor Seth Goldstein.

“Rather than look at a 3D model on a CAD (computer-aided design) program, a physical model would be manifested on your desk,” said Babu Pillai, who, along with Jason Campbell, is heading up the project. “The material would change shape under software control.”

(from ZDNet, Attack of the killer prototype robots)

Intel literally has, in hand, the first prototype of a new type of nonvolatile memory chip that its executives think could someday supplant flash memory and thus change the face of the industries such as cellular phones, music players and possibly even PCs.

Intel, as part of a lengthy joint venture with ST Microelectronics, has produced the first Phase Change Memory or PCM chips — nonvolatile memory chips that work well for both executing code and storing large amounts of data, giving it a superset of the capabilities of both flash memory and dynamic random access memory.

This means it can both execute code with performance, store larger amounts of memory and also sustain millions of read/write cycles.

It’s necessary to invest in technologies such as PCM because flash memory will eventually hit a wall in which it can no longer scale with silicon manufacturing.

(from eWeek, Intel Previews Potential Replacement for Flash)

I found a real gem today: Jack London: Writings.

I am going back and forth on terminology in Spider Season. On the one hand, I am already using “goblin” and “ogre”, and I will probably use “troll” as well. On the other hand, I am averse to using “elf”. It just seems so hackneyed. I have been reading up on mythical creatures from India, Persia, Scandinavia, and elsewhere: “asura”, “jinn”, “dev”, “huldra”, “kropel”, “haldjas”, and so forth. But some of these terms are popularly associated with images that may or may not have anything to do with their traditional mythical meanings (“jinn”, for example). Also, if I mix and match terms from wildly different cultures (Estonian “haldjas” and Hindu “asura”, for example), I think it’ll just annoy people who actually know something about mythology, and they’ll think I am an ignorant twit who is just using terms he found in a thesaurus without understanding them. Not an unfair accusation, really. So I feel like I have three options: 1) stick to English terms even though it strikes me as hackneyed, 2) stick with the terms from one culture (probably Persian, because I think fewer English-speaking people are familiar with those myths), or make up words from whole cloth. I really don’t want to make people learn a whole batch of vocabulary words just to read a silly fantasy novel. But is making up new words any worse than using existing words that people may not know — deliberately mis-using them, in many cases (much like Tolkien misused “wight”)? I guess I do have a fourth option: use common words and apply them to these creatures: “hidden folk”, “moon people”, “forest folk”, and so on. Bleh. I don’t really like that.

Maybe the simplest method is the best: use English words (“elf”, etc.), and be clear to describe their referents so that people won’t think an “elf” is a little man in a green coat riding an earwig. Sigh. It still strikes me as hackneyed. Maybe my problem is that it really is hackneyed — not just the terminology, but the entire concept of having human beings that aren’t quite human beings. People in latex appliances, to use a Star Trek metaphor. Maybe non-human creatures should be really, really non-human. The only problem with that is that the less human a character is (not just in appearance, but in behavior and speech as well), the harder it is for people to sympathize with it. Can we really empathize with an eyeless, six-armed creature that eats rocks and communicates through rhythmic stomping?

What makes this such a nuisance for me is that I have a character — a minor character — who is for most intents and purposes a conventional elf. He is definitely not human, but for the character to work he has to look almost human. He will probably be the only creature of his kind in the entire book (although there might be another).

When in doubt, go with the simplest answer. Use English.

Or maybe Estonian.

Fun With Shorts: A Touch of Magic

Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against an alleged hacker who broke through its copy protection technology, charging that the mystery developer somehow gained access to its copyrighted source code.

For more than a month, the Redmond, Wash., company has been combating a program released online called FairUse4WM, which successfully stripped anticopying guards from songs downloaded through subscription media services such as Napster or Yahoo Music.

Microsoft has released two successive patches aimed at disabling the tool. The first worked — but the hacker, known only by the pseudonym “Viodentia,” quickly found a way around the update, the company alleges. Now the company says this was because the hacker had apparently gained access to copyrighted source code unavailable to previous generations of would-be crackers.

(from ZDNet, Microsoft sues over source code theft)

I see two possible explanations for this. Either it is inconceivable to Microsoft that anyone could break their Digital Rights Mafia scheme without having inside information, or they are subverting the legal system in order advance their corporate interests (again).

Here’s what is on my nightstand right now:

Hindu Myths
The Historian
Persian Mythology
Persian Myths
The Superhero Handbook
Wicked
Wicked: The Grimmerie

I haven’t done much actual writing on Spider Season over the last few days, but I have been laying a lot of groundwork: figuring out relationships, mocking up scenes in my head, deciding on plot points, and so forth. I have decided not to use units for anything if I can help it. Instead I will refer to a day, half a day, most of the morning; a pace, a day’s travel, a week’s travel; and so on. One unit of measure that I will keep is the “stone”, because that is sufficiently archaic without seeming too tied to our specific world. I could see people in a primitive society measuring things in “stones”.

I think the maguffin is a ring and a book. The book is magic: the ring is anti-magic. This is what protects her against the evil sorcerer that wants the book. But if the ring is anti-magic, how can she learn magic from the book? If she takes the ring off to cast spells, wouldn’t the evil sorcerer strike then? Maybe the evil sorcerer is a ruse to get her to go to the Ivory Tower. She needs to stay focused on her goals, though. She looks at this bit with the sorcerer as a distraction.

The Free Software Foundation has recently clarified “inaccurate” information about GPLv3. The clarification closely follows the release of a position paper signed by top Linux developers, in which they announce their objections to the proposed GPLv3. Linus Torvalds was a noteworthy exception. He recently explained why he didn’t sign the GPLv3 position statement, but why he still supports the GPLv2 open-source license.

As much as I despise the Digital Rights Mafia, I have to agree with two of the points made by the Linux kernel developers. First, adding anti-Digital Rights Mafia conditions to the GPL imposes something that GPL v2 is justly praised for lacking: end use restrictions. You do not have to agree with anyone’s politics or agenda to work with them on a GPL v2 project — all you have to do is agree to share your work. It’s politically and culturally neutral. I don’t think enough people appreciate how valuable that is. Second, the additional restrictions section is a huge problem. The Linux kernel developers declare that this section “makes GPLv3 a pick and choose soup of possible restrictions which is going to be a nightmare for our distributions to sort out legally and get right. Thus, it represents a significant and unacceptable retrograde step over GPLv2 and its no additional restrictions clause.” That’s about as clear as anyone can put it, I think.

So as much as I sympathize with the goals of the people working on GPL v3, I don’t think I’ll be using it, or working on any projects that do. (Not that I am doing much open source programming — or programming at all — now that I am at Circuit City, but I hope that this is a temporary situation.)