Happy Kalends of Octobris! Are you ready for the October Horse?
Happy Kalends of Octobris! Are you ready for the October Horse?
Deep underneath the town of Southfork, in a bluff forged so many years ago that no one remembers the land was once flat, the characters face the ghost of the Druid whose wrath buried the once proud town in rock. He had summoned a Dragon Turtle to fight by his side, and bars the party from reaching the standing keep above the ruins where Mow’s husband has been imprisoned.
They fight. Mow grapples the Druid, claiming him as her child and desperately asking him to stop attacking them. He makes her dance, uncontrollably, and she realizes that they have no choice. A series of fast strikes by Jad’s glaive leaves him dead, though not after he begins to cast the spell that would leave them entombed here like so many others. As he dies, the druid calls out to his lost love. He tells her that though he has fallen, the villains of Southfork will no longer be able to chase her. She and their child can escape.
The dragon turtle dies shortly after, felled by Pulsar and Jad. As the cavern falls silent, Kieran and Truffles see that the magic that had animated this place was fading. For better or ill, as Pulsar realizes that the cavern is unstable and has already started to break and settle. The living town of Southfork above them is in danger.
Still, they have time to take a well-deserved rest. After, they climb up a pole and attain entrance to the Keep above. Arriving in a wine cellar, they are confronted by a halfling sommelier named Brindle Tealeaf. Brindle tells them that he misses the old Archduke who ran Southfork - the Inquisition General and his men do not appreciate his work. They tell him that the Keep and Southfork are in danger of collapsing. Brindle panics, turning and running deeper into the keep screaming of “Catastrophe”.
The party had their own task, however. They quickly find their way to the dungeons where Mow’s goblin husband has been imprisoned for years while she searched for him in vain in the city of Tsuran. Her memories restored, the guards would not bar her from finding him. The party rips through the guards and finds both the husband and a mysterious other person, his face hidden by an iron mask that is chained to the wall. Not having time to consider they free them both, but quickly find the only entrance blocked off by an increasing number of soldiers. Kieran casts a spell that throws a pillar of celestial light, while Truffles uses entangle to trap them. Still, there was no other way to get free; things looked grim.
At that same moment, their patron calls to them and teleports them away. They find themselves with the other escapees from Tsuran. Aegon tries to explain, but is interrupted by Qest. The air genasi informs them that they are free to go, but only if they cease interfering with his work in Tsuran. If they refuse, Qest will repair the wall and wipe the memories of all in the city; their families, friends, and allies would be lost to them forever. Resolving to stop this, the parties aimed their attention to a high mountainside where they would have a chance to disrupt Qest from harvesting the arcane energies he needs to succeed.
They fight. Mow grapples the Druid, claiming him as her child and desperately asking him to stop attacking them. He makes her dance, uncontrollably, and she realizes that they have no choice. A series of fast strikes by Jad’s glaive leaves him dead, though not after he begins to cast the spell that would leave them entombed here like so many others. As he dies, the druid calls out to his lost love. He tells her that though he has fallen, the villains of Southfork will no longer be able to chase her. She and their child can escape.
The dragon turtle dies shortly after, felled by Pulsar and Jad. As the cavern falls silent, Kieran and Truffles see that the magic that had animated this place was fading. For better or ill, as Pulsar realizes that the cavern is unstable and has already started to break and settle. The living town of Southfork above them is in danger.
Still, they have time to take a well-deserved rest. After, they climb up a pole and attain entrance to the Keep above. Arriving in a wine cellar, they are confronted by a halfling sommelier named Brindle Tealeaf. Brindle tells them that he misses the old Archduke who ran Southfork - the Inquisition General and his men do not appreciate his work. They tell him that the Keep and Southfork are in danger of collapsing. Brindle panics, turning and running deeper into the keep screaming of “Catastrophe”.
The party had their own task, however. They quickly find their way to the dungeons where Mow’s goblin husband has been imprisoned for years while she searched for him in vain in the city of Tsuran. Her memories restored, the guards would not bar her from finding him. The party rips through the guards and finds both the husband and a mysterious other person, his face hidden by an iron mask that is chained to the wall. Not having time to consider they free them both, but quickly find the only entrance blocked off by an increasing number of soldiers. Kieran casts a spell that throws a pillar of celestial light, while Truffles uses entangle to trap them. Still, there was no other way to get free; things looked grim.
At that same moment, their patron calls to them and teleports them away. They find themselves with the other escapees from Tsuran. Aegon tries to explain, but is interrupted by Qest. The air genasi informs them that they are free to go, but only if they cease interfering with his work in Tsuran. If they refuse, Qest will repair the wall and wipe the memories of all in the city; their families, friends, and allies would be lost to them forever. Resolving to stop this, the parties aimed their attention to a high mountainside where they would have a chance to disrupt Qest from harvesting the arcane energies he needs to succeed.
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It is impossible to overstate how good Ryan North’s take on the Fantastic Four is. He gets them as a family, as a super-heroes, and as super-science explorers. Case in point is issue #33, released three months ago - the Fantastic Four decide to travel back to the Big Bang to fix their current predicament (Ben lost his powers due to a whole Doctor Doom crossover, and now all of them are losing their powers). Most of the issue is brainstorming how they would survive for nanoseconds in the most hostile environment possible. Then comes the sacrifice. And the epilogue of the issue are big-mind contemplations on the fact the universe is made of matter. So incredibly excellent.
They’re going into a new volume next issue (which Marvel does now, for basically any random reason that they feel like), and hopefully Ryan North will still be knocking it out of the park.
For that matter - if you haven’t already, go read his run on Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.
They’re going into a new volume next issue (which Marvel does now, for basically any random reason that they feel like), and hopefully Ryan North will still be knocking it out of the park.
For that matter - if you haven’t already, go read his run on Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.
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21 works reviewed. 11 by women (52%), 9 by men (43%), 1 by non-binary authors (5%), 0 by authors whose gender is unknown (0%), and 8 by POC (38%).
The chart is breaking formatting. Need to fix or remove it. I do like charts, though.
September 2025 in Review
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(![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
james_davis_nicoll Sep. 30th, 2025 08:45 am)
james_davis_nicoll Sep. 30th, 2025 08:45 am)
Two stories about beautiful people partying their way through time.
Elegy for Angels and Dogs /The Graveyard Heart (Tor SF Double, volume 24) By Walter Jon Williams & Roger Zelazny
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I have this mental block about actually "fixing" leaky bicycle tubes. Swap in a new one and move on. But tubes aren't exactly cheap (especially since both my regular bicycles have odd size wheels and I have to mail order), so the last several flats I've kept the tubes, meaning to patch them. Eventually.
Last week I had a flat on the right front of the tricycle, removed a small thorn from the tire, and put in a new tube. That made three leaky tubes waiting for a fix. This morning, the same wheel was soft, so I assumed I'd missed the actual culprit. Figured this was my cue to actually patch all the tubes, so I filled up the kitchen sink to locate the leaks. The three older tubes had clear leak sites, though the most recent of those was very small and slow.
But I couldn't find any leak in the newest tube. I suppose it's possible I didn't have the valve tightened completely and it was leaking slightly through the stem. (The tricycle uses Presta valves.) So I checked the tire carefully for possible causes and put it back on. We'll see tomorrow if it's gone soft again. Which would be annoying.
But at least I've gotten a bit more practice in getting the tire on and off, which requires a high level of believing that it can be done plus significant hand strength. (The front wheels on the tricycle can be worked on without removing them from the frame. The rear wheel is...more complicated. But not quite as complicated as the rear wheel of the Brompton fold-up, which involves a lot of keeping track of which small item goes where.)
Given how many miles I put on the bike, I probably have a relatively low rate of flats. I got heavy duty tires because the rec trails have some vegetation hazards. (Star thistles can serve as surprisingly functional caltrops.) Glass is less common. One flat was due to a small, short wire that I only found by running my finger around the inside of the tire. (Ouch!)
Last week I had a flat on the right front of the tricycle, removed a small thorn from the tire, and put in a new tube. That made three leaky tubes waiting for a fix. This morning, the same wheel was soft, so I assumed I'd missed the actual culprit. Figured this was my cue to actually patch all the tubes, so I filled up the kitchen sink to locate the leaks. The three older tubes had clear leak sites, though the most recent of those was very small and slow.
But I couldn't find any leak in the newest tube. I suppose it's possible I didn't have the valve tightened completely and it was leaking slightly through the stem. (The tricycle uses Presta valves.) So I checked the tire carefully for possible causes and put it back on. We'll see tomorrow if it's gone soft again. Which would be annoying.
But at least I've gotten a bit more practice in getting the tire on and off, which requires a high level of believing that it can be done plus significant hand strength. (The front wheels on the tricycle can be worked on without removing them from the frame. The rear wheel is...more complicated. But not quite as complicated as the rear wheel of the Brompton fold-up, which involves a lot of keeping track of which small item goes where.)
Given how many miles I put on the bike, I probably have a relatively low rate of flats. I got heavy duty tires because the rec trails have some vegetation hazards. (Star thistles can serve as surprisingly functional caltrops.) Glass is less common. One flat was due to a small, short wire that I only found by running my finger around the inside of the tire. (Ouch!)
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I apparently saved this picture earlier but never actually posted it so it could be linked elsewhere, so--here it is! ( Read more... )
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/socialists-zohran-mamdani-2008-financial-crisis-f98e54fa?st=3RiiAo&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
The Wall Street Journal reports on young people embracing socialism. What was once Occupy encampments have become leaders of a large number of grass roots organizations. This is, really, another impact of the trauma of the financial crisis of 2008, just as Trumpism is. Entire generations of people witnessed how badly things could get, though we were guaranteed it "could never happen". That same people saw our system bend over backwards to save financial institutions.
This was at a time when the costs of globalization were crystal clear. Manufacturing in the US had basically died. Jobs that would at one point guarantee the middle class disappeared, replaced with minimum wage jobs that offered no stability, no health care, and not enough money to live on. Entire towns were ruined. The reaction to it was that people needed to "adapt", as if adapting was a thing you could simply command people to do without providing any of the necessary resources. By this point, both parties had actively participated in shredding the safety net. People needed help, but the government was simply not there.
It cannot be a surprise, then, that when the government was very much there for the banking sector, that people were angry. And when the government finished being there for the banking sector it decided the problem was finished. The problem, of course, was not finished. The economy, instead, grew worse and worse for people.
This directly leads us to here. People's political and economic leanings have changed in a fundamental fashion. I postulate that it is because the political class has no solutions to the problems they are facing. They have been unwilling to posit solutions for the entirety of my adult life. Is it any wonder whatsoever that the direct result of this has been the exploration of new, political systems, to see if they have the potential to change things?
The Wall Street Journal reports on young people embracing socialism. What was once Occupy encampments have become leaders of a large number of grass roots organizations. This is, really, another impact of the trauma of the financial crisis of 2008, just as Trumpism is. Entire generations of people witnessed how badly things could get, though we were guaranteed it "could never happen". That same people saw our system bend over backwards to save financial institutions.
This was at a time when the costs of globalization were crystal clear. Manufacturing in the US had basically died. Jobs that would at one point guarantee the middle class disappeared, replaced with minimum wage jobs that offered no stability, no health care, and not enough money to live on. Entire towns were ruined. The reaction to it was that people needed to "adapt", as if adapting was a thing you could simply command people to do without providing any of the necessary resources. By this point, both parties had actively participated in shredding the safety net. People needed help, but the government was simply not there.
It cannot be a surprise, then, that when the government was very much there for the banking sector, that people were angry. And when the government finished being there for the banking sector it decided the problem was finished. The problem, of course, was not finished. The economy, instead, grew worse and worse for people.
This directly leads us to here. People's political and economic leanings have changed in a fundamental fashion. I postulate that it is because the political class has no solutions to the problems they are facing. They have been unwilling to posit solutions for the entirety of my adult life. Is it any wonder whatsoever that the direct result of this has been the exploration of new, political systems, to see if they have the potential to change things?
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2016: The Chilcot Inquiry illustrates the meticulous process by which the UK went to war in Iraq, Lord Lucan is declared dead, and the UK’s narrow vote to leave the EU is at worst the second stupidest collective decision made by a Western democracy in 2016.
Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Way Down Dark by James Smythe
Pretend I caught that the poll autofilled the wrong question and that it reads "which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read?"
Poll #33672 Clarke Award Finalists 2016
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 48
Which of these look interesting?
View Answers
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
21 (43.8%)
Arcadia by Iain Pears
2 (4.2%)
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
7 (14.6%)
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
11 (22.9%)
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
40 (83.3%)
Way Down Dark by James Smythe
0 (0.0%)
Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.
Which 2016 Clarke Award finalists did you read??
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Arcadia by Iain Pears
Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
The Book of Phoenix by Nnedi Okorafor
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
Way Down Dark by James Smythe
Tags:
The Cherryh titles I dropped into ngram fell into 3 patterns:
Ones whose titles don't play nicely with ngrams. I dropped those.
Ones where the mentions per year decline fairly steadily year to year.
Cyteen. What's up with Cyteen? Did Jo Walton mention it on tor dot com around 2009?
Table of Contents
- Part 0: Introduction (you're reading it)
- Lots more to come!
Introduction
I started outlining this series months ago, while I was on sabbatical, but never got around to starting the actual words. I've got a new job now (at OnePass, a refreshingly sensible company providing actually-useful services, which is sadly not the norm at the moment) -- work is extremely busy, but I do need to think about things other than that and politics sometimes, so let's get this going!
All year, I've been mulling the problem of Trust Architectures: how do we share information about "trust" online. As I'll discuss under Use Cases (next time), I think it's getting to be Steam Engine Time to take it seriously. Between the AI Slopocalypse spewing nonsense all over the Web, and the social networks succumbing to Advanced Enshittification, it's getting ever-harder to understand who to trust.
This isn't even remotely a new problem, mind -- it was a pretty old topic when we explored adding this sort of thing to Trenza way back in 2001. But it's rarely been taken really seriously, and most of the better attempts have wound up buried inside proprietary walled gardens that don't necessarily have the human user's best interests at heart.
There appears to be a lot of relatively recent literature on the topic, some of it possibly even good (I'm cautiously intrigued by the OpenRank project). But much of it is obsessively focused on Blockchain, which I'm rather skeptical about (I still consider it to be 90% a solution in search of problems), and most appears to have a lot of assumptions baked in.
So let's step back, and tease this apart. I'm going to intentionally go in a bit naively, so as not to be too biased by everyone else's assumptions, and explore the topic from first principles, winding up with a very high-level sketch of how things might work. Once I have straight what I think are the interesting use cases, requirements, and architectural parameters, we can take a properly critical look at what's already out there.
I expect this to take at least 6-7 installments, likely more like 10 before I'm done -- it's a big, chewy problem with a lot of facets. As I add parts, I'll add them to the Table of Contents at the top of the Dreamwidth version of this post. I'll likely edit some of these posts as we go and folks point out additional nuances; I'll try to be good about crediting folks who point stuff out, so call me on it if you feel like you haven't been acknowledged properly.
This is not fully-baked yet: I'm going to be thinking out loud. That's why this is "towards" -- I'm seeking to make progress here, and we'll see where it winds up. It's possible that we'll find that the One True Trust Architecture already exists, and we should be lobbying for everyone to adopt it. It's also entirely possible that we'll conclude that the problem is insoluble in principle, and give up. (Hopefully not.) The goal is to come to a better shared understanding of the topic, and ideally some actionable ideas about how to deal with the problem.
I hope you'll join in. While I'm going to do a lot of talking over the next couple of months, it's going to be a lot more productive if you chime in with your thoughts and ideas to add to that.
I'm intentionally posting this on Dreamwidth because despite (or maybe because of) its antiquity and old-fashioned UX, it's still the best place for posting and discussing complex, long-form topics, free from the AIs and enshittification consuming most other places.
So I'm planning to post primarily to Dreamwidth, mirror to Medium and LinkedIn since some of the technical crowd mainly knows me there, and link from Mastodon and Bluesky. (But not Facebook, which I've mostly given up on, or Xitter, which I've entirely abandoned.) On platforms that have tagging, I'll be using #TrustArch as the tag for this series.
Comments are welcome at all of those places -- I'm curious to see where I get good conversations -- but the authoritative copy of these posts will be Dreamwidth, and that's the copy that will get edited and updated as this evolves.
That said, a couple of ground rules. I don't want to see comments saying that if it's not 100% perfect, it's not worth trying. (I'm reasonably certain that it's impossible to make this perfect, but I'm moderately confident we could create something helpful.) And I'll be downright scornful of naive claims that we should just leave this for AI to deal with -- while I think it's likely to get quite powerful over the next decade, I'm not at all sanguine that it's going to be trustworthy to that degree any time in the foreseeable future.
But aside from that sort of thing, I'd love to get some serious conversation going. So come along, share your thoughts, and let's tease apart this important problem!
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(james_davis_nicoll Sep. 28th, 2025 08:59 am)
james_davis_nicoll Sep. 28th, 2025 08:59 am)
Nine science fiction stories by the author of The Universe Between.
Tiger by the Tail and Other Science Fiction Stories by Alan E. Nourse
(huberthubert posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
little_details Sep. 28th, 2025 12:08 am)
huberthubert posting in little_details Sep. 28th, 2025 12:08 am)Hello everyone!
I am writing a oneshot essentially set in the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. My character is so surprised and overwhelmed by what he is seeing that I am introducing his senses one by one, but I couldnt quite imagine what it would smell like being in his position.
I know its quite humid, so thats probably the bulk of the experience, but are there any other, more subtle undertones I could include to make the scene feel more alive?
Even if you havent been to the exact location, any experience in a subtropical, humid climate would already be quite helpful.
Thank you!
I am writing a oneshot essentially set in the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. My character is so surprised and overwhelmed by what he is seeing that I am introducing his senses one by one, but I couldnt quite imagine what it would smell like being in his position.
I know its quite humid, so thats probably the bulk of the experience, but are there any other, more subtle undertones I could include to make the scene feel more alive?
Even if you havent been to the exact location, any experience in a subtropical, humid climate would already be quite helpful.
Thank you!
So I am a bit of a reader. I tend to read multiple things at once, depending on mood. I thought I could use this post to show my current reading.
Books
Poyer, David, The Academy. St, Martin’s Press, 2023
Colley, Susan Jane, Vector Calculus. Pearson, 2012
Khalid’s, Rashid, The Hundred Years War on Palestine. Metropolitan Books, 2020
Géron, Aurélien, Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and Tensorflow. O’Reilly Media, 2023
Newspapers
Economist
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Magazines
The Atlantic
Scientific American
Foreign Affairs
Books
Poyer, David, The Academy. St, Martin’s Press, 2023
Colley, Susan Jane, Vector Calculus. Pearson, 2012
Khalid’s, Rashid, The Hundred Years War on Palestine. Metropolitan Books, 2020
Géron, Aurélien, Hands-on Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn, Keras, and Tensorflow. O’Reilly Media, 2023
Newspapers
Economist
New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Magazines
The Atlantic
Scientific American
Foreign Affairs
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The Atlantic’s cover story this month is on the history of originalism, tying it to the politicization of the judicial process and, in turn, tying it to America’s modern unwillingness to use the amendments process. It treads some fairly known ground including the fact that Originalism ignores that history is the study of humanity, which is never as neat and tidy as Originalist judges would have you believe.
Of course if we want to talk about amendments, my first suggestion would not be this article, but Judge John Paul Steven’s’ excellent Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Amend the Constitution (Little, Brown, and Company, 2014)
Of course if we want to talk about amendments, my first suggestion would not be this article, but Judge John Paul Steven’s’ excellent Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Amend the Constitution (Little, Brown, and Company, 2014)
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Six works new to me: four fantasy, one mystery, one non-fiction (from an unexpected source)... unless you count the fantasy-mystery as mystery, in which case it's three fantasy and two mysteries. At least two are series. I don't know why publishers are so averse to labelling series.
Books Received, September 20 — September 26
Poll #33662 Books Received, September 20 — September 26
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 43
Which of these look interesting?
View Answers
An Ordinary Sort of Evil by Kelley Armstrong
12 (27.9%)
Sea of Charms by Sarah Beth Durst (July 2026)
12 (27.9%)
Following My Nose by Alexei Panshin (December 2024)
11 (25.6%)
The Fake Divination Offense by Sara Raasch (May 2026)
7 (16.3%)
The Harvey Girl by Dana Stabenow (February 2026)
8 (18.6%)
Scarlet Morning by ND Stevenson (September 2025)
17 (39.5%)
Some other option (see comments)
1 (2.3%)
Cats!
32 (74.4%)
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I’ve been picking my way through the last two novels of David Poyer’s Dan Lenson series. It’s very gripping - picture a modern version of the Hornblower novels, complete with a main character filled with doubts. Really, I picked it up at the start of a six volume storyline about war with China. It’s some really good political and military thriller. Definitely doing some of the same things Clancy did with the Cold War in modern setting. Probably the most alarming is the crack-up of the US and the rise of authoritarianism here; it’s very clear the author has thoughts on it. All in all, good read.
For reasons, I ran some errands today so Adrian and Cattitude could stay home.
The main goal was to take a bathrobe to the Zipper Hospital, and ask them to replace the damaged zipper. So I did that, and was surprised by the sign saying they took cash and checks. Cash only would have surprised me less; in practice, I doubt they're being given many checks these days. They want payment in advance, but I had enough cash to cover it, so I didn't need to ask them for the location of the nearest ATM.
I then went to LA Burdick's, for a cup of hot chocolate, and a bag of chocolate-covered orange and lemon peel. The hot chocolate was good, but I spilled some on myself when I opened the takeout cup. So, I drank the hot chocolate, carefully; went to Trader Joe's; and then took the trolley home.
The trip wasn't a huge amount of walking, but it's the most I've done in the last couple of weeks. I did a little PT this afternoon as well; I've been keeping up with that pretty well.
The main goal was to take a bathrobe to the Zipper Hospital, and ask them to replace the damaged zipper. So I did that, and was surprised by the sign saying they took cash and checks. Cash only would have surprised me less; in practice, I doubt they're being given many checks these days. They want payment in advance, but I had enough cash to cover it, so I didn't need to ask them for the location of the nearest ATM.
I then went to LA Burdick's, for a cup of hot chocolate, and a bag of chocolate-covered orange and lemon peel. The hot chocolate was good, but I spilled some on myself when I opened the takeout cup. So, I drank the hot chocolate, carefully; went to Trader Joe's; and then took the trolley home.
The trip wasn't a huge amount of walking, but it's the most I've done in the last couple of weeks. I did a little PT this afternoon as well; I've been keeping up with that pretty well.
I’ve been itching for a lj like blogging platform for a while now, so I thought I would create a dreamwidth account. Social media is basically trash, so let’s see where this goes.
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