Music: By The Rivers Dark

 Leonard Cohen: 

This really feels (like so much of Leonard Cohen's work) as if it should be the seed of a story.

Shadow Academy: Pre-Reading

So, for this week I've been reading (or in one case re-reading) several books at once to kind of get a feel for how I want to lean into the Hogwarts-But-For-Monsters project. Basically, I've also been poking at some other series that seem to be off in the same direction to see how they handle their initial setup and introductions, and what might work for me. So, here's what I'm looking at: 

A Living Nightmare (Cirque Du Freak): I thought I'd take a dive into this one since it seemed to have monsters, and school-aged-children becoming monsters, and that's sort of the direction I'm headed. It's... not what I thought it might be, and (at about one third of the way through it) I'm not entirely sure I know where it's going, though of course I have my suspicions. It's taking a long, slow, horror-story buildup which is interesting in its own way, but definitely not what I want to do. Our narrator and his three friends are in high school when a mysterious freakshow comes into town, and two of them manage to sneak away and watch the show, where the acts become stranger and more terrifying by ominous degrees...

Vampire Academy:  Right, a school for vampires, definitely worth looking at to make sure I'm not about to retread well-worn ground. Only this one starts in media res, with the narrator realizing that her roommate is having a nightmare, shaking her awake, and letting the roommate -- a vampire -- feed on her, since the narrator is a half-vampire herself. The dhampir (half-vampire) realizes someone was watching through the window from outside and saw them, so as the vampire's protector she immediately evacuates them both. This is all basically the first scene of the book; my Kindle says I'm 3% of way through. So, my first reactions were, Wow, that got moving quickly, and Wow, that was amazingly sapphic and do they even realize that they're girlfriends? But this is opening with an established relationship between the two characters and with both them apparently comfortable in their roles as supernatural beings, which is definitely not what I'm looking for. I want to read on a bit further and see what they do with the eponymous Vampire Academy itself, but as far as the opening goes there's no resemblance to what I have in mind.

The Burning Sky (The Elemental Trilogy): I'd never heard of this one until somebody mentioned it on Twitter, and having read the whole trilogy I'm frankly amazed that it isn't wildly more popular. It's not as comparable to the Harry Potter books as that initial mention led me to believe, but it does feature young wizards fighting an evil overlord and his armies, and of course there's romance as well. There is actually a college involved, though it isn't a college of wizardry; it's Eton College, in 1883, which serves as a sort of backdrop and contrast to all the magical scheming going on. And it opens with both of its main characters already well-established as wizards; their education is as much learning about the true nature of their enemy as it about learning magic. So, much as I loved these books, they weren't particularly relevant to what I'm doing here. (I mention them primarily because I firmly believe that more people should read them. Seriously, go download a sample. Go!)

The Lightning Thief: It's been a while since I read this one, so I'm less clear on its details. I think I remember the general shape of it, though: ordinary young man, raised by a single mom and now at boarding school, discovers that he's far less ordinary than he believed when his teacher turns into a monster and attacks him and his best friend turns out to be a satyr. He arrives at Camp Half-Blood, where the half-human children of the gods are gathered for learning and protection, and begins to learn about his powers. Much as I liked this, there are definitely things I'm doing differently. For one thing, I want a somewhat older main character; for another thing, the gods in Percy Jackson and the Olympians are all these sort of horrible, absentee parents. And I don't want one super-powerful parent, either; I think it might make a nice change to have a young hero who comes from a stable, loving family with fairly ordinary, human parents.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: This, of course, is the main thing I'm looking at, since it's easily the most popular and best known Wizarding School book series in recent memory. It's also, in its way, the weirdest of the lot: it doesn't even start by introducing its main character. In fact, it starts by introducing the Dursleys -- the aggressively ordinary and respectable parents who will go on abuse Harry for the first ten years of his life -- and then Dumbledore and McGonagall, two wizards, who explain about the end of a terrible, hidden war among the wizards and the end of Voldemort. When the story finally does introduce Harry, it's as a baby in a basket. The whole first chapter is basically just a massive infodump/piece of foreshadowing, and it only works because it manages to be quirky and entertaining while the reader is trying to figure out where this is all going. (If the same background information had been given as a traditional preface, nobody in the world would have read more than halfway through.) 

Once the actual story gets going, it's essentially a Cinderella story: neglected young boy living a life of misery in an abusive household is saved when a messenger arrives to tell him that his parents were special, that he is special, and that he's needed in the wonderful, magical place where he truly belongs. He is taken to Diagon Alley and given his first taste of magic; then, a bit later and overcoming a few challenges in the process, he makes his way to Hogwarts to learn wizardry. Unlike Cinderella, being plucked away from his horrible life is only the beginning of the story, not the Happily Ever After; but the fairy tale setup is unmistakable. Annnnnd yeah, I don't really want to do that either. 

Okay, so what should be similar and what should be different? Well, for starters, their ages: Percy Jackson is twelve when he discovers Camp Half-Blood; Harry Potter is rescued from the Dursleys on his eleventh birthday. I want my protagonist, Darian Silver, to be old enough to make decisions for himself. And I've had enough of this selected-out-of-nowhere bit; he's applied to go to the Shadow Academy because for the last year strange things have been happening around him and it's making trouble for his family -- he's making trouble for his family. So he's decided to go somewhere that will be hopefully better equipped to deal whatever's going on with him. And his family isn't entirely happy about this, but they're prepared to respect his decision. 

And that's where I need to come in.

Challenge: Greatest Strength

For the last two years, I've been taking part in the Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge over at Long and Short Reviews. I've had a great deal of fun with it, so naturally I'm continuing it this year. If you'd like to participate, follow that first link for the list of prompts, and then check the main site for the weekly post with links to everyone's responses (and add your own link, if you're so inclined). 

Today's prompt is "my greatest strength" and... boy, howdy, that took me a minute. I am not feeling anything to do with greatest strengths right now; we're thawed out and everything's getting going again, but this past week has been yet another object lesson in just how much of what we call "civilization" is actually just a murderous scam. Still...

All right, I can answer this. And actually, I think I have two answers for it. 

In daily life (and especially in my work), my greatest strength is patience. I do a fair amount of troubleshooting and training (in addition to maintaining and updating some computer systems) and in both cases, the ability to just... not get frustrated... is invaluable. Explaining things in simple English is also a surprisingly useful skill; hire liberal arts folks for technical positions, y'all.

(It helps to remember that an awful lot of things are very obvious once you've seen them, but not at all obvious before then. I have a lot of users who are like, "I'm so stupid about this stuff," and they're really not; they're just dealing with detailed and slightly finicky process that they only use every couple of months. Of course they're not going to remember how it works, even if they take notes -- and a lot of them do.) 

So day-to-day, I'd list patience as my greatest strength. 

But every once in a while -- and this is actually kind of related -- I think my greatest strength, my actual super-power, is the ability to Just Not Care about unimportant things. Major system just went down! Whose fault is it!? I don't care, how do we fix it? I posted something on the website two hours ago, then got sent an update to replace it with... and then another, and then another? I don't care, it still needs to go up. Project leader has decided that we're going to do something the difficult, unreliable way that will make more work for us in the long run as well as the short term? I can't affect the decision, so I don't care. 

I cannot tell you just how much I despise the phrase "It is what it is" -- as far as I can tell, it always means "this is stupid, difficult, and could be easily resolved but we're going to do it this way anyhow" -- but when I find myself in or adjacent to one of those situations, the ability to Just Not Care comes in very handy.

EvilParty: The Chessboard of Doom

We continue experimenting with levers, trying to claim the final orb. We're forced to rest again, but after some switching things around we have the fourth orb and start placing things on platforms.

As with the previous area, each orb emits a beam of light and the hatch opens onto a pool of water.

Once again, we send Chuck ahead. He goes down and pops out on a new level, invisible and un-drown-able. He reappears a moment later.

Chuck: "There's like some sort of dumb fucking chessboard... whoever built this place was waaay into themselves and their stupid puzzle stuff. There are more orbs and another hatch and some more of those clockwork guys, but I think we can go down safely enough."

The floor is a misaligned chessboard, with mechanoids set at various points on the board and two walls of electricity running down the sides. Each square is ten feet by ten feet.

Chuck steps onto a black square, and the first row slides ten feet to the left. There are no mechanoids here, so he steps onto the next black square, which moves the second row to the left and brings one of the mechanoids into the field of lightning. It straightens and looks up, and now we're in combat.

Chuck moves first, and casts Scorching Ray at the mechanoid knight. (This is just a suit of armor, not the nasty life-draining thing we fought last time.) The fire damages it.

Jenny steps onto a white square, which shifts the row to the right and carries her closer to the mechknight. She barely keeps her balance, but still manages to attack. Unfortunately, it's like attacking an iron statue; very little damage.

The knight moves forward and attempts to smash her with an iron fist, but misses.

Hatch tries magic missile but doesn't do a lot of damage. Ramikin flies over a black square and the whole row shifts left. Apparently it doesn't require body weight to activate them; good to know. Bob -- Frost Giant Skeleton -- steps over and whangs the guy without setting foot on a square, and the knight goes down.

We move around a little more, discovering that anybody carried off the board disappears into a little cubby, and then we activate one of the centaur-types by moving its square into the wall of lightning. It moves around and tries to cast a spell on Chuck, who saves; but that's taken it within Bob the Skeleton's reach, and Bob bonks it with his axe. Chuck and Hatch both fire off scorching rays; Chuck fails to penetrate its magic resistance with his, but Hatch hits with both of his.

Jenny moves up onto a new square, which slides Bob, Ramikin, and Jenny closer to the mechanical centaur. It takes advantage of this to slap back at Bob, doing some damage; fortunately, Bob is a skeleton and soaks most of it. Jenny steps in with her chaos-tinged whip and tags it hard. Bob swings and loses his grip on his axe, which is now several squares away; he claws at the thing and takes it down.

We move forward carefully, until Bob retrieves his axe. Chuck tries to move diagonally and accidentally sets off The Wrong Square, activating one of the Big Uglies that we fought at the end fo last session.

Chuck attempts to use Web on the thing, but it fails. He manages to tumble to another square, shifting the row; the shift carries him into the lightning wall. He soaks most of it, and the Big Guy smashes him with his fists twice. The fists carry electric and sonic damage, but Chuck is very fortunate that he's a vampire; he's resistant to a lot of that.

Bob charges forward on Jenny's command, shifting the battlefield and activating another one of the knights, then tosses Jenny onto a square. She steps onto a white square, carrying her into range, and tears into Big Guy construct.

Hatch throws a scorching ray and does some damage; Durest drops a flame Strike on the two constructs, killing the big one and fucking up the knight. Chuck finishes off the knight.

He maneuvers the row he's on, until we can see the whole row; but doing so activates another of the knights; fortunately, Jenny is standing in range and just carves it up before it can even finish activating.

We continue manipulating the board, until Chuck stops us and drops a fireball on a cluster of not-yet-activated beasties up ahead of us.

Hatch decides this is a good idea, and drops his fireballs on the batch as well. They're harder to damage while they're inactive, but after a bit of shelling we've destroyed the two knights and injured the centaur and the big one.

We move things around a little more, getting the third pedestal closer to the lightning wall and activating one of the knights. It moves in, attacking Chuck but not doing too much damage. Jenny attacks it and rips it apart.

We move on, revealing the full width of more rows. We look at the position of the remaining constructs, and start dropping preemptive fireballs.

Then we move, and activate another knight on the far side. Chuck throws another Fireball off in that direction, and the knight steps in and punches Bob in the face. Jenny, irritated, rips this one apart as well.

We claim the last orb, and open the next gate. There's another bit of shuffling to get us off the board, and then Hatch uses Dimension Door (twice) to go get Ramekin. We have crossed the room, retrieved all four orbs, and are ready to head down to the next level. We also decide to take a break here; these puzzles are exhausting.

Ruin Twiceborn: Darksight

Ruin gestured towards the pile of kindling and mouthed the words that he'd memorized in childhood. He'd never had much knack for sorcery, and he'd forgotten what little skill he'd ever had. Unlike Darvinin, he thought, though without any particular jealousy. I couldn't cast a spell to save my life.

He looked out into the trees, then up into the branches that closed out the stars. It was dark here, as dark as the inside of a cave -- and almost as chilly. No, he was never going to be any sort of wizard... but he could see in the dark. 

It was something he'd learned from exploring through the amulet. In its visions, he traced out various sorts of terrain, explored tiny details of different environments, put them together and learned from them... and somehow, in the process, grew stronger. He no longer grew exhausted after great exertions, and now he could see in the dark. Neither ability was going to destroy his opponents for him, but then he had a blade for that. And they were helpful things, useful, things that might give him an edge. 

He wondered, again, about his mother's first love: who she'd been, what she might have become, and if he'd ever meet her. He was beginning to think that it might be more likely than it seemed.

This dog...

So Crotchstomper McSnuggles went out into the back yard and found a dead bird. And of course, when Firstborn called him back inside, he brought it in with him. And the dog is not-well behaved when it comes to taking things away from him. (He'll play tug-of-war with rope and like that, but if he's stolen some food -- or a dead bird -- and you try to take it away from him, he will threaten to bite.) Right now, he's additionally crazed from having been stuck in the house with no walkies for the last three days.

The result of which, for now, is that the dog is in his kennel, the bird is outside of our back yard, and the grippy-claw thing that I was using to try to pick it up is broken... not because he tried to bite it, but because I immediately smacked him over the head with it when he did. It was clearly not designed for that. 

So now I'm ordering another (hopefully tougher) gripper, and we're looking up additional dog training to teach him not to bite (and hopefully not to steal food), and the word "birdcicle" has been added to our household vocabulary.

Say what you will about being trapped in a snowstorm, but it's certainly not boring.

It Snowed Again

It snowed again last night, as predicted. It doesn't look like too much; maybe another two inches, but that's two more inches of snow and another several days of cold in a state that simply isn't prepared for it and mostly doesn't seem interested in dealing with it. (Amusingly, the theme for today's Weekly Blogging Challenge is "how I take care of my health" and the answer, at this point, is "stay warm, and reach out to friends and family who might not have electricity." Like so much of 2020, at this point we're just trying to get through it and hoping there's something better on the far side.) 

There's a lot of misinformation going around, including reports about Texas' "green grid" failing, and... look, first of all, the only reason you get to call it a green grid is because you colored it that way on a map. Second, while the wind energy resources have largely frozen up, that's a very small source of power generation here in the middle of winter and ordinarily the rest of the grid could cover it; plus, the wind turbines could have been winterized, but nobody wanted to put the money into doing that down here where it never gets cold. (Ha!) Which is basically what's going on with the other power plants, though there may be some artificial scarcity and price gouging figuring in as well what with the sudden rise in demand for natural gas (which supplies power to our power plants as well as heating to a lot of dwellings). 

But it's also worth noting that, as we've been discussing for at least a decade now, Global Warming isn't universally warmer; it's better described as Global Weirding. Heat is energy, and if the atmosphere is holding extra heat it's going to produce wilder, more spectacular, and more destructive weather events. I realize a lot of news services don't seem to be able to grasp this, but this is Climate Change 101. 

We're lucky: we still have electricity. (No gas -- the house isn't built for it -- but we're not just sitting here freezing.) We're trying to use as little as possible, but the house is staying warm and the indoor pipes, at least, haven't frozen. It helps that we're a relatively small, snug house; but even so, the pipes for the kitchen are in the outer wall and have frozen closed at least twice already. Fortunately, we've been able to restore them with a hair dryer. 

Meanwhile, the dog hasn't been on a walk in three days; he is absolutely sure that this is the end of the world. The local school district is shut down until at least Friday (and probably will be on Friday as well) for both in-person and distance learning; you can't do remote teaching to people who have no power. My job has moved to "late opening" for people who are still coming in, but that's because it's local government and has a crippling pathological fear of being seen as "lazy government employees" even in the face of genuine danger. But, of course, nobody much else is available, so I'm using this time to catch up on online training instead of working on the half-dozen major projects that are going to immediately fall on my head once things get going again. Beautiful Wife has had her classes cancelled for the rest of the week; she's using the time to nail down resources for the rest of the semester... which, again, is only possible because we still have electricity. (This, in turn, is probably only because there are a couple of private care facilities including an Alzheimer's unit relatively close by.) So far, nobody has had to come shelter with us -- a relief, since we're still in the middle of a pandemic -- but if this keeps up, I don't know. 

So, yeah: I knew 2021 was going to be at best the beginning of a long, slow climb back up from 2020... but I hadn't really appreciated the way the steady cascade of ongoing apocalyptic disasters would just blithely continue. But here we are, and the only way through is as it always was: forward, and together.