Rich and Strange Aeons

It has been 5 years since I read a Vlad Taltos novel (re-reads of Issola and Orca, and a bunch more in 2017), but I still know the Cycle verse by heart. Granted I was looking at the visual diagram, so I was prompted by the House names in order and can't be certain I'd have reconstructed that on my own, but I knew all the couplets cold.

My guess as to which Houses are considered noble vs. middle class was off. I thought maybe everything from Athyra to Issola was noble, and the rest middle (apart from Teckla as lower class), oh with Yendi as an exception. But it calls Iorich noble (not too surprising) and Orca (more surprising, given all the sailors, though they can also be rich bankers.) Jhereg is also weird, 'noble' (Vlad's title even comes with a few tenants somewhere, no paper nobility!) but criminal. Just Tsalmoth, Vallista, Chreotha, and Jhegaala as the "true" middle (shopkeeper and artisan) class.

I've just gotten up to Something Weird happens to Vlad, but it has been a pleasant and engaging read so far. And without the signs of poor editing that some recent novels have had.

I'm reading over this section, and remembering the plot, and wondering if Dracula was the original Dark Lord character in fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_Dracula#Powers_and_weaknesses

I'm reading this George MacDonald book, said to be an influence on Tolkien. It certainly does see reminiscent of the Hobbit and the Prologue, and maybe the Father Christmas Letters and my dim memories of the Lost Tales. But unlike some people (Tolkien), there's a note as to what the goblins live on:

The goats belonged to the miners mostly-a few of them to Curdie's mother; but there were a good many wild ones that seemed to belong to nobody. These the goblins counted theirs, and it was upon them partly that they lived. They set snares and dug pits for them; and did not scruple to take what tame ones happened to be caught; but they did not try to steal them in any other manner, because they were afraid of the dogs the hill-people kept to watch them, for the knowing dogs always tried to bite their feet. But the goblins had a kind of sheep of their own—very queer creatures, which they drove out to feed at night

His essay on osanwe-kenta says it's not limited by range, just familiarity, like Mind Touch in the Blue Rose RPG. While we see some telepathy in LotR, one doesn't really get a sense of long range communications. Ditto for the Noldor in Beleriand, I don't recall a sense of either using palantiri (supposedly invented by Feanor!) or telepathic cell phones between intimates.

One of the Middle-Earth palantiri was put up in Elostirion and could only look west, back to the Master-Stone in Avallone. This tells me Elrond could have been chatting with his (biological) parents for the past 3000 years. Raise your hand if you ever thought that was implied by the texts...

I attended a Boskone panel on women in SF. It was mentioned that mother main characters were scarce, then that even scarcer were women for whom motherhood was not the impetus for action. Naturally I tried to make a list.

Maternal main characters:
* _Saga_. I forget their names, but the narrator's parents are the focus of action, as is keeping the infant narrator alive.
* _Paladin of Souls_: Ista. She is a mother, but it's not what she's doing.
* _Barrayar_: Cordelia's motherhood is critical.
* _Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen_: Cordelia's son is well into independent adulthood; OTOH, the story is driven by Cordelia's desire to be a mother again.
* _My Enemy, My Ally_: Ael is deuteragonist (along with Kirk) of this Star Trek novel. Her motherhood is incidental to her actions.

Maternal side (but important) or ensemble characters:
* _Children of the Lens_: Clarissa MacDougall had been active as the Red Lensman; I think she sees action again in this book, with her children grown.
* Star Trek TNG: Dr. Crusher. I think her being a doctor is important more often than her being Wesley's mom, but I've barely seen TNG, so I don't know.
* Star Trek III: Carol Marcus, Genesis scientist and mother of David Marcus.
* Nanoha (TOS and A's): Admiral/Commodroe Lindy Harlaown commands a dimensional starship; her teen son serves under her; she also adopts a girl in or after A's.
* Nanoha StrikerS: sort-of main character Nanoha adopts a child during the series, and the "best friend" whom she shares a bed with becomes "Fate-mama" as well.

I re-read the first three novels last week, and have started the fourth. Observations:

* It is a fast and easy read, it feels like I'm zipping through in no time.
* It feels like we barely see Quirrell, especially as a teacher. But then, we see very little of any classes in the first book.
* Arthur Weasley seems feckless as a person and silly in his ignorant Muggle-enthusiasm but he's pretty competent as a wizard, making a flying TARDIS car, and casually repairing Harry's glasses.
* Rowling's naming wordplay is still great. Yes, it's 'childish' compared to Tolkien or Hodgell, but it works, and there's so much of it.
** "Quirinus is also used as an epithet for the Roman god Janus"
* I remember thinking Harry/Ginny came out of the blue when I first read the 7th book, but Ginny's crush on Harry is pretty starkly obvious from book 2 on. Harry's interest, I dunno. I still favor Harry/Luna myself.
* People often say the Wizarding World is stagnant but there are a lot of counterexamples. One early one is broomsticks, which get better and better over the course of the first few books. Possibly too much so, for something they've been using for centuries. Also, the werewolf suppression potion Snape make for Lupin was a recent discovery, postdating their time at Hogwarts.
* What's with Crookshanks the intelligent cat?
* Owls have some convenient deep magic to be able to find people otherwise in hiding but not be abused to reveal their location or deliver a letter bomb. Well, maybe you could do the latter. [Edit: reading the wikia, there is in fact magic you can use so owls don't find you.]
* First book is 350 pages, 4th is 750. :O

And finally... so, more obsessed minds than mine have grappled with the Wizarding World demographics, but some things leapt out at me. It's very explicit that there are 5 boys in Harry's Gryffindor year, and 20 broomsticks in a two-House flying class. Assuming uniformity, this points to 40 students a year, 280 for the whole school. Given the number of teachers we see, and that one teacher will teach a subject for all seven years, this fits.

Assuming an average lifespan of 150, that'd be 40*150 = 6000 wizards in Britain. Maybe up to 12,000 if you assume severely damaged demographis due to Voldemort.

IMO this fits too. 6000 is a large town or small city by medieval standards, certainly capable of supporting a fair number of businesses, especially given that wizards are quasi-post-scarcity in mundane ways. They don't have an actual city, but with Floo and Apparate teleportation they can basically be a distributed city. The economy is Vague but being based largely on doing magical services for each other fits. Having a top-heavy government for the population kind of fits; you've got a heavily armed population with a lot of free time and a lot of secrecy, leading to high regulation and high "keep them busy". No idea how that's paid for, though.

Some oddities though. 200 people show up on Slytherin's side in a Quidditch match, but maybe they were from outside the school.

If most people don't break their wands much, Ollivander's main business would be supplying 40 students a year. But he's best in the world, maybe he gets a lot of international business. And if 1% of British wizards break or lose their wand a year, that'd be another 50+ wands a year.

6000 wizards in Britain implies 600,000 in the whole world. 100,000 showing up for the World Cup would be 1/6 of the population! But again, middle-class population with teleportation.

JKR apparently has opined 1000 students at Hogwarts and 3000 wizards in Britain, which is an insane population distribution. 1/3 of the population would be in the 11-18 age range. That's not a high life expectancy. Having gone to a 900 student college, I'll say Hogwarts does not feel like that to me.

I'm assuming a modern age pyramid, stable population, tapering off in the mid-100s. One fan disagrees, noting that wizards died of Dragonpox, and suggesting that while wizards have great healing magic when it comes to injuries, they may be subject to diseases, magical or even mundane (how many are vaccinated?) As well as a rather higher death rate from violence, what with being a population of gunslingers, Voldemort being the most feared Dark Lord of the century... implying more Dark Lords. (We *know* of Grindelwald.)

Other questions:

* How do they get food and raw materials? You'd think they magic it up, but the last book sai they can't live on conjured food, IIRC. Though magic could steal food or tranform biomass, I'd warrant.
* Do pure-bloods like the Malfoys and Weasleys, or Dumbledore, even exist as far as British bureaucracy is concerned? Harry and Hermione should, 'just' living a rich secret life, but what about others? Do their houses exist on Muggle records of title, or are they all mentally invisible to Muggles? We're told Hogsmeade is the only all-wizard community, implying everywhere else wizards have Muggle neighbors, but their deep ignorance of Muggle life belies that. The Malfoys have a manor, but the Blacks had a "don't notice me" house right in London.
** Likely this simply doesn't stand up well to critical thought.

Hanging out on /r/fanfiction recently, I've run across multiple people who hate 1st person narrators. This baffles me, like "I won't read books by women" or "I won't read books with a girl lead". There are so many great 1st POV books out there, including seminal works of the genre or its penumbra as well as 'literature': Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, the parts of Moby Dick that aren't pure infodump, Amber, Night in the Lonesome October, Vlad Taltos, Book of the New Sun, Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee, Sunshine, Heart of Darkness, the Farseer trilogies, Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, Bertie Wooster, Hunger Games, Ancillary series, Black Company, 20,000 Leagues... and multiple high quality fanfics.

(Also my own Nanoha fics but I make no claims for the quality of those.)

I don't know how choate these thoughts will be, but let's try. So, there's urban fantasy, a genre I am aware of but not steeped in. Fairies or wizards or vampires, usually living in the dark corners of something like the modern world. "Buffy", Neverwhere, The Gypsy, Agyar, most magical girl anime (Sailor Moon et al.), World of Darkness RPGs, etc. Sometimes the supernatural comes into the open, like Anita Blake or Sunshine.

I know of one example of 'urban fantasy' of the past: the series starting with Midnight Never Come, with a faerie court living under Elizabethan (and later) London.

But how about the future?  If we can have vampires lurking around the modern era, why not in a future society?  Captain Kirk and Vampires ('real' ones, not the salt kind).  Captain Janeway and magical girls.  Well, there are some practical problems, like anticipated future surveillance, but still, for a lot of beings with access to some sot of Otherspace and/or camera-fuzzing magic, that's not that big a problem.

So now I'll list what I know that sort of fits this, in various ways.

The most obvious is "To The Stars", set around 2450 CE of the Madoka universe, where magical girls have been covert until the last 20 years, and the fic is heavily about both magical girl society and the SFnal society they live in.

Sailor Moon itself has that Crystal Neo-Tokyo that Usagi rules over 1000 years in the future.  I don't know much about it though.

There's a fanfic I didn't read much of, blending Fate/stay night with Macross Frontier, and Emiya Shirou on the Frontier shortly before it runs into the Vajra aliens.  He's a mage in secret, so it fits.

"Buffy" had Fray, the Slayer of the year 3000 or maybe 2200, vampires mistaken for just another mutant, and genuine 100% magical demons not being as weird as the mutant fish-boss Fray works for.

Vampire Hunter D is kind of like this, though post-apocalyptic in feel.  Vampires existed, came out, took over the world and ruled it as Nobles, then got overthrown?  and D runs around killing monsters for the sake of farmers who are homesteading it with solar panels and force fields and laser home defense systems.

Nanoha takes place in our time, but achieves a similar feel by switching place: we start in Tokyo as another secretive magical girl thing, and end up in a sort of magical Starfleet in other dimsnesions? worlds?  Instead of To the Stars' immortal MGs living into the future where they work in the military, our heroines simply emigrate to a more advanced and technomagically open world where they work in the military.

Vampire Winter is in my notes, though a bit different: WWIII happens, nuclear winter happens, a vampire discovers he can go out in the attenuated daylight (yay!) but that this puts the sustainability of his food supply at risk (uh-oh), and acts on that.

Part of the interest is in magic and high tech interacting, so I'll mention Sunshine, which has a hilarious line about master vampires who can't go out any more using kickass VR rigs instead.  And using e-mail a lot.  There's also Shadowrun, at the tail end of what I'm thinking of.

So, I finally finished the Lets Play of the Fate/stay night visual novel. That sentence probably made no sense to most of my readers, so let me expand:

Visual novel (VN): a Japanese thing I'm not that knowledgeable about. It could be as simple as a novel with graphics, simple animations, and sound (music and dialog). In practice, they usually have you make choices, so it's like a multimedia Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA) novel. They're also thought of as a game -- and usually H (for hentai) or ero games, with some sexual content -- albeit ones with far more reading than playing. They also make use of running on a computer: as they're usually about relationships (as it were), you can accumulate relationship points with different characters, which affects branches later on, so it's a bit more complex than a CYOA book.

Fate/stay night: one particular VN by Kinoko Nasu. No one knows what the title means, if anything. The English translation has been described as 800,000 to a million words, twice as long as the Lord of the Rings. It has spawned an anime of the same name, which I'm told is not that good (though popular); a manga, about which I've heard nothing; a prequel light novel series called Fate/zero by Gen Urobuchi (basically canonized fanfic) which spawned an anime of its own; and most recently an anime Fate/Unlimited Blade Works based on the second 'route' of the VN, which I'll explain later. I've seen Fate/UBW (strong start, pacing lags later) and Fate/zero (just plain strong, though dark.)

I imagine that there might be some way to run the VN/game in a Windows environment on my Linux box, with the fan-made English translation files. But, that's a lot of work, and after playing the American-made Black Closet, I'm not sure "playing" this sort of game is really my thing. Happily, some heroic servant of the people made a walkthrough, aka a Lets Play, of the (fan-English) game, including all the bad endings and extras, but excluding the (allegedly bad) sex scenes. I started reading it over a month ago, on October 11th. Last night, I finished.

In addition to being long, the player had snarky comments about Nasu's "words word words", long (not that long) philosophical ramblings at times that didn't make tons of sense. So my ideas for snarky titles were Unlimited Verbiage (as above) or Unlimited Nasu Words, for a closer play on titles.

***

In addition to being longer than LotR, Fate/stay night could also be thought of as a trilogy, but in a different way. It's basically three different stories (also called 'routes') about the same characters and general events. Not three different perspectives on the same sequence of events (which could be interesting, and there is a bit of that in the prologue), but three different main sequences, branching based on early choices by the player. (I guess? I'm actually not sure if it branches solely on that; there seem to be aspects of three different related worlds, with differences that wouldn't depend on your choices. But, not sure, don't care enough to hunt it down.) Two of the routes also have two different good-ish endings each, and across all three routes there are 40 Dead Ends (you die) or Bad Ends (you otherwise fail). It's actually pretty channeled: you have to play the Fate route first, then the UBW route, then the Heaven's Feel route. Another reason I figured I might as well just read it.

So, was it good? It was engaging, at the very least: I didn't take a month to finish because I was slacking off in boredom. It does have flaws and confusing bits; never know what to attribute to the original author vs. the translator, I'd guess some of both. By the end of the UBW anime I was joking that the Holy Grail could punch holes in the plot, not just space.

It has more female roles than LotR, and strong ones. You play as Emiya Shirou (Japanese name order), a teenage boy, but interact heavily -- and not just sexually -- with various girls or women. Tohsaka Rin has been called the deuteragonist, as she plays a major role in all three routes, is the heroine (or love interest) of the second, and even gets to be the narrator in the prologue and one of the endings. (She's also an iconic character of tsundere, twintails, and zettai ryouki fashion... one of my early reactions to the UBW anime was "she's obviously tsundere, but I don't mind, because she's tsundere to *everything* and life in general, not just as a love interest.") And there's various other women, strong in combat, magic, and/or surviving a lot of crap. (And some of them do get a lot of crap to survive.)

It does pass the Bechdel test. I'm not sure it passes it often -- if two women are talking there's a good chance it'll be about Shirou, though "what an idiot" is more likely than "what a hunK" -- but it does.

Shirou's infamously sexist in some ways, like "girls shouldn't fight" despite the girls being able to fight on a completely different level than him, though someone on TV Tropes argues it's deeper than that: that he didn't want Saber fighting because she was *injured*, but (a) couldn't say that well (see: idiot) and (b) thought his life wasn't worth protecting. After barreling through the whole thing, I'm agnostic on the question, aka "I don't want to go back and re-read the first route to have an informed opinion."

The nature of the story allows it to plunder myth and legend at will. Sometimes brutally ("X was never like that!" people say, though I'm "eh, I can see it") but sometimes with research ("Y actually was described as a pretty boy").

It's inspirational: I imagine a lot of fanfic from it (though checking, not as much as I thought; it does rank higher in crossovers than on its own, which makes some sense), and have had some RPG inspirations of my own already. And I can see plundering some of the characters for future PCs. It definitely has memorable characters, of both sexes.

One cool thing for me is that at least three characters are basically Lawful Good (Saber is *officially* LG, she has a stat sheet in-universe!), with very different personalities, and none Lawful Stupid. (Shirou can be dumb but it's more your standard Shounen Stupid). I have an interest these days in how characters can be morally straight-and-narrow yet different people. (Nanoha is also good for that, and to a lesser degree Order of the Stick. Possibly superhero media in general, but that's less my thing.)

Basically, I had fun, and am glad I read it. Should you read it? I don't know if it's *that* good, objectively speaking. Would it be of interest if you hadn't seen related anime, as I had? I can't say.

I know I haven't described what it's *about*; there's a zillion other sources for that, though, so I was going for some underexploited angles, as well as "this was to my taste, if you like my taste you might too."

(Edit: one thing it's about is heroism and the sacrifices made for it. I'm not sure if it says anything deep or useful about it - -I've been more reading than thinking -- but that's definitely A Theme. Maybe even The Theme.)

The new icon is, of course, Rin, apparently giving one of her "now listen up, idiot" lectures.

Economics profession swings left http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-07/economics-stars-swing-left

Cracked on prostitution myths. Anecdotal, but consistent with studies I've read and possibly linked to in the past. http://www.cracked.com/article_21862_5-ways-life-as-prostitute-nothing-like-you-expect.html

Pew on the religions of Asian-Americans. Christian 42%, 26% none, 14% Buddhist, 10% Hindu. http://www.pewforum.org/2012/07/19/asian-americans-a-mosaic-of-faiths-overview/
As a group, they range from the least religious unaffiliated to the most evangelical Protestants. Majority of Korean-Americans are Protestant; I think back in South Korea only 25% are Christian, with 50% having no religion.

Idea on why Charlie Hebdo was attacked:
http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html
"France is a country of 66 million, of which about 5 million is of Muslim heritage. But in polling, only a third, less than 2 million, say that they are interested in religion. French Muslims may be the most secular Muslim-heritage population in the world (ex-Soviet ethnic Muslims often also have low rates of belief and observance). Many Muslim immigrants in the post-war period to France came as laborers and were not literate people, and their grandchildren are rather distant from Middle Eastern fundamentalism, pursuing urban cosmopolitan culture such as rap and rai. In Paris, where Muslims tend to be better educated and more religious, the vast majority reject violence and say they are loyal to France.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination."

Westeros-world map updated for Worlds of Ice and Fire http://awoiaf.westeros.org/images/1/10/WorldofIceandFire.png
GRRM deconstructing war, dark Daenerys (spoiles for whole series https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/2013/10/05/untangling-the-meereenese-knot-part-iv-a-darker-daenerys/ )
Dornish vengeance (ditto) https://meereeneseblot.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/water-gardens-and-blood-oranges-part-iv-it-ends-in-blood/

no to Boston Olympics
http://m.thenation.com/blog/194529-dear-boston-its-protest-time-say-hell-no-olympic-games
http://www.nobostonolympics.org/

experience of black atheists http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/12/black-atheists-representation/

Attack on Titan/Frozen AMV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXR0WIbubB0

Saudi Arabia and 9/11 http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/new-questions-raised-about-u-s-saudi-relationship-1.2890528

America's poor vs. those in other rich countries http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/01/05/america_s_poor_vs_the_rest_of_the_world.html