1000Gears contains stories of life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Some content may be inadvisable for the young of body or the small of mind. Please exercise all appropriate discretion.
A small, elderly Japanese lady showed up on my doorstep Sunday afternoon, wanting to discuss the Bible and the possible coming of the End Times. Normally I don’t mind; I have a running joke that I would probably have become a priest if my parents hadn’t insisted on taking me to church. This is another post, for another day (or another month, at the rate I’ve been neglecting this site), but really all you need to know for this story is that I’m a little better at theological gymnastics than most door-to-door evangelists expect. When I’m in the mood for an argument, it can be a lot of fun.
Unfortunately, this Sunday, I was not in the mood for an argument. Fanime is coming up and I am trying (again) to make progress on First and Last and Always, my long-in-coming Tybalt story. Sunday was the first really good chance I’ve had in almost a month to work on it, and this small, elderly Japanese lady was interrupting my efforts to write, well, gay magical catboy sex. I kept trying (and failing) to put sentences together in the back of my mind, and trying to keep the two thought-streams separate was… difficult, to say the least.
There didn’t seem to be a polite way to explain this to her. Does anyone out there have suggestions?
Amy Vanderbilt is curiously silent on this situation.
One day, long ago, in an era now lost beneath the sands of time, a fledgeling wizard by the name of Snickt remembered the stories his grandmother once told, of her grandfather, a hero and a decorated soldier in the Great Rebellion. Growing tired of his studies, he went into the attic and opened the chest of his great-great-grandfather’s things. His ancestor must have been a modest man in his old age, for he was no ordinary soldier, nor even any ordinary hero; young Snickt recognized in that chest the armor and weapon of Feared Erdrick the Kingslayer, the greatest terror of his generation, and indeed of any living memory.
They said that he was part demon, that he had slain even great and noble silver dragons and forged armor from their hides. When finally the last of the old royal line lay exterminated at his feet, they said, he had spat in disgust, turned away, and walked into legend.
And it was true. Even now, the Rebellion turned into a new royalty for over a hundred years, Erdrick’s armor still glittered, bright with malice and enchantment.
In the second room Snickt visited, even before the first combat, he found a chest with a fully-loaded Wand of Wishing. He wished for blessed scrolls of charging, blessed +2 silver dragon scale mail, and blessed fireproof +2 speed boots, then recharged the wand and made some more wishes, for a blessed rustproof +2 helm of brilliance, a blessed +2 Magicbane, and +2 blessed fireproof gauntlets of dexterity. For storytelling purposes I decided that this should be his “starting” equipment.
The fabled Magicbane gleamed in his hand, elemental chaos black. Blood rushed in his head, and he heard the voice of Anhur calling to him.
“Serve me,” it said. “Go forth into the Dungeons of Doom. Bring to me the Amulet of Yendor and you shall become more powerful than Erdrick even dared to dream.”
Over at ErosBlog, Faustus has started a discussion about the way porn – Internet porn in particular – can influence children’s lives and development. I doubt there are any really easy answers. Children mature at vastly different rates, in vastly different ways. They encounter different kinds of porn and respond to different pressures.
Hello! A few days ago I made a special Tybalt logo for this website, and perhaps a few of you have seen him peering out at you from the upper-left corner of your screen. Tybalt is wonderfully pretty, of course, and I think the logo is a nice kind of extra touch. Unfortunately, clicking on this logo still took you back to the home page, just like clicking any other version did. That was not very helpful. We do get new readers sometimes, and not everyone knows who Tybalt is.
So, I thought to myself, “Self, why not make the special logos take people to different parts of the website? You could make more logos sometimes and show people around.” This sounded like a really spiffy idea, so I opened up the back panel to the website and started taking things apart, fiddling around, and putting them back together again. It turned out to be a little bit more complicated than than I expected. I think I broke the site once or twice, but it should be fixed now.
