mfbrandi

Yelm is one of the Greater Gods and a key upholder of the Cosmic Compromise. As the Ruler of the Universe, Yelm must interact with the other forces of the cosmos. This includes the gross and unclean material elements of the cosmos … Yelm is Illuminated and can deal with the polluted world without becom[ing] corrupt through his supreme moral virtue. This includes Chaos of course, for Chaos is part of the universe. But because we are Yelm we cannot be tempted by Wakboth. — Jeff Richard, Illumination and the Solar Religion —————————————————————————— But this is a mistake. A mistake only those dazzled by the ruling class would make. The pride is there and the middle way, but Yelm is not the ruler of the universe — the very idea! Yelm is Philip Marlowe: —————————————————————————— It is not a fragrant world, but it is the world you live in … It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization … But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world … he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr … if he is a man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people; he has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge; he is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. — Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder —————————————————————————— Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world. — Raymond Chandler, The High Window

I certainly hope so.

Thanks. WHERE I WENT WRONG: So the really dumb conjecture — just vague handwaving, really — is that if you superimpose a plane figure in all its orientations and align on the horizontal and vertical axes (Inkscape style), you get the minimum area that will contain the original figure in any orientation. That is not proved by me and may be well known to be false. Obviously, it will contain the figure in all orientations, the question is whether something smaller can. We know the constructed shape is not the same for all figures, as for a circle it is a circle and for a Reuleaux triangle it is a rounded-cornered square.

But if the celibate labrys-wielding sisters — presumably originally an expression of male insecurity about feminism (they must be monsters, etcetera) — became enforcers for Gilead or accepted pregnancy for themselves to get with the programme, then the hell with canon.

OK, but I am still not sure what you mean by “absolute point symmetry”. Do you mean that the shape described will be a filled-in circle — that the accumulated figure will have the symmetry of Monster Yelm (or Darkness)? I’m no mathematician, and I am not sure how we would prove that. With our current approximation to the Storm rune and 120 copies rotated and centred (i.e. 3° precision), we get: It doesn’t look like it is tending toward a circle, but appearances can be deceptive. Iconographically — i.e. playing silly buggers — do we want it to? If so, why?

Sure, but don’t you think there has been a bit of a tone of “let’s see just how hard we can push up against those physical limits — ’cos why wouldn’t we?” in the discussion here? If I am tone deaf, it wouldn’t be the first time. As for social limits, I had in mind something more like ethical limits: things one can push past but shouldn’t. (The things that chaotics like me always get accused of ignoring.)

Is it enlightenment and Chaos magic that built the Empire, or is it good old-fashioned imperialism that allowed such experiments and cultural flourishing? In the real world, think of the Athenian Empire enabling philosophy and theatre or — at empire’s sticky end? — the Tories’ “you’ve never had it so good” society setting us up for the Swinging Sixties. It may be ugly, but isn’t that often how it goes? Subsequent feedback loops (real or imagined) may then lead us to flip the direction of causation. Of course, in fiction, we can simply stipulate the direction of causation. Is this dishonest? Not necessarily, but be careful what you read back into the “real world”. (This prompted by today’s radio discussion of Oedipus the King and stuff over at Monster Empire.)

The phrase always makes me think of “an everyday story of Kentish folk.” So it goes …

I refer the court to Exhibit 1: We Who Are About To … by Joanna Russ. I am not saying the Orlanthi are all going to die in the recovery period, but the way this is being discussed makes the situation sound like a women’s rights nightmare. See also Gilead. Responses along the lines of “this is voluntary, the women all really, really want to be made magically fertile” sound to me like “they are all gagging for it”. I am NOT accusing anyone here of that, but a focus on the numbers can result in losing sight of the fact that this is a human situation. We surely don’t want to treat the surviving women “of reproductive age” as cows on a factory farm awaiting the visit of the “AI man”. (And yes, certainly, many people don’t want that for our cows, either.) Perhaps if anyone in the tribe gets too gung-ho with their repopulation plans, the Babeester Gor cult can bring a little [ahem!] sanity to the situation.

By “point symmetry”, you mean rotational symmetry of order 2, right? (Apologies if not.) But surely you can take two copies of any rune, rotate one, and generate a new composite figure with that symmetry, no? But must there be pairs of Umath time-slices with this property? One can imagine those “wild and crazy” storm types positively revelling in refusing every kind of symmetry and quasi-symmetry offered. Why not? Unpredictability is their thing. Leave all the cryptic symmetry stuff to the Arkati conspiracy theorists and their well-thumbed Dan Brown paperbacks. (The wheel of change lacking rotational symmetry still bugs me, though.) The storm propagandists can then say that it is the extreme rotational symmetry of the sun that is the mark of a monster. The more thoughtful of the storm theorists can say that you create monsters from the bilateral symmetry of chaos by giving it a spin — although everyone will stop saying it when the Storm Bulls start burning crosses on their lawns. Meanwhile the solar scribes will poo-poo etymologies from languages that have clearly fallen through a wormhole from “another world” and hymn the perfection of symmetry — the more the better — and claim that Umatum is worse than chaos — lacking even its primitive bilateral symmetry — and worse than Krarsht, who at least had the decency to adapt to Yelm’s cosmos by giving her void a twist to produce order 3 rotational symmetry. Nothing on the perfection of a circle, obviously, but at least she showed willing. Storm is less than nothing. It is nice that moon and chaos sit between the extremes of sun and storm. We don’t have to take runic symmetry seriously, just wind up the Gloranthan scribes and let them throw dung at each other.

This got me thinking about runes and symmetry: So if we generalise and have increasing orders of rotational symmetry — especially if produced from something with lower order symmetry — be the indicator of monstrousness, the circular runes would seem to be most easily associated with monstrousness. has only bilateral symmetry, not rotational. Like , , and (there are more). Some runes have order 2 rotational symmetry — i.e. only fit into themselves at 0°/360° and 180° — and so (on this bizarre line of thinking) wouldn’t be monstrous: , , , , has no rotational symmetry and lacks even bilateral (mirror) symmetry. Appropriately, this puts it at the opposite end of our spectrum from . lacks rotational (and bilateral) symmetry, which for a wheel is mad. Law I suppose could be derived from the old Force rune (or Dara Happan “sh”?) — something like /\ — which has bilateral symmetry. Rotate smoothly and you get , which some may find appropriate. , , and arguably (i.e. the ‘normalised’ way I draw it, else it is bilateral like Death and Chaos) are monstrous at order 3. outdoes them at order 4. , , , , and can all be rotated freely and fit into themselves. Note that by rotating smoothly about the centre of one ‘ball’, you can generate from — the sun: a more monstrous illusion. I haven’t tried to fit all the runes into this scheme, that is left as an exercise for the student. If you buy into the spectrum of chiral —> bilateral symmetry —> increasing orders of rotational symmetry (with monstrosity kicking in at 3) — and there is really no reason you have to — what does it all mean? If anything! If Krarsht wants a glyph, rotating works well:

Paper is undead trees sealed with kaolin? No longer will anyone order the dead tree edition — from now on, the zombie tree edition.

Yeah, but that’s control, control, control. More imperial jackboot than liberation. That is, everything and everyone is seen as a problem to be solved by the civilized people who know better. Is it Tim Leary vs. the Merry Pranksters in classical drag? Who is going to put on the Electric Kool-Aid Illumination Test? Just keep Jim Jones well away from the punch bowl.

Although, ironically, it was “A Sound of Thunder” that gave us the butterfly effect — small changes, big consequences?

No, not exactly: they are points on a triangle. If = rock and = scissors, then what is paper? (as we have noted before) is a crutch. The eternal is a crutch for those who cannot accommodate to the temporary, the provisional, and the contingent. Those reaching for the noumenal tend to treat the phenomenal world quite shabbily. “Their eyes were on God” — oh, dear! 😉

Quite right: take ’em at their word — no sequence in Godtime, so any sample is chock full of the worst of the Gods War (and everything else, admittedly). There is no safe haven. It is the nightmare interpretation of Schrödinger’s Cat Carrier — a box whose insides don’t bear thinking about. Time’s a doddle in comparison. Sure we’re slowly sliding into the void (nothing to be dreaded), but there are plenty of good times left. It is a shame that the idiots keep trying to blow it up in attempts to Make Glorantha Great Again. Do we say time is opening the box, finding a live cat, and then coming to terms with the fact that the cat will die eventually? Hmm … “chock full of the worst of the Gods War and everything else”. Is that the secret of Dorastor, that it is a little bubble of Godtime? Ralzakark a palimpsest of the best and the worst a demigod can be? Leakage from other planes has turned Dorastor into one of the Strugatskis’ Zones?

Sure, Zelazny and Glorantha are a good fit, but if Zelazny is too into his heroes, Glorantha seems often to lack even Zelazny’s level of skepticism.

First: hooray for Frieda Harris (and Pamela Colman-Smith)! Where would the “magicians” have been without their artists? The collapse of the binary? p or ¬p is doing just fine. If people are wedded to p or q (where p and q are logically unconnected), that’s their problem. But this is unfair, as you were clear that Howard was unnerved by the polyvalent sign. Although sometimes I wonder if is not p or ¬p itself that freaks people: if you like, ¬p is the void — the simple failure of p to be true, to be the case — but they would rather oppose p with q — something definite, like “it is a broo with two heads” — but then the void opens up again as p and q fail to exhaust the logical space; they freak again; they become impossible to live with. (The void vs. the chaotic feature … the chaotic creature … the chaotic creature feature — now playing at a cinema near you.) I do sometimes wonder whether Hillfolk wasn’t Robin Laws’ this is how to do Gloranthan soap opera moment. Right, now I am off to dance the entropy tango. (Oh, alright, to cook.)

Especially when political Greeks would be so much more fun.

I don’t get it, either. But rather than wang on about the intrinsic horror of Orlanth and his people (as I usually would), perhaps I should consider some external factors making the Lunars more appealing than the Orlanthi: There is the sheer weight of stuff about the Orlanthi — it is probably pretty hard to stay interesting at that length. The Lunars have the advantage of not so much stuff written about them. (I mean there was some, but it mostly got binned.) In-world POVs have long been a Glorantha thing, and there is this weird idea (not universally applied) that if x is the focus of attention we should have x (or an x sympathizer) do the talking. But naturally, it would be much more interesting to hear someone bitch about me than to listen to me talk about myself. (There is some recognition of this in making Ethilrist a crashing bore and copious memoirist.) Again this plays to the Lunars: Sartarite accounts of Lunar atrocities are going to make them seem more attractive than a Lunar commander telling us, “In order to save the village, I had to feed it to the Bat.” It might have been interesting to have had the Lunars only described by external unreliable narrators, with each playgroup being forced to fill in the details for themselves if characters were going to interact in detail with the Lunars: FANDOM: What does Lunar philosophy mean? Is the RG a threat to existence? Just how big is the Bat? Who makes the best potato soup? CHAOSIUM: I dunno, you tell us — and you had better all have different answers! And to leave a chaotic void at the heart of things would be thematically appropriate, but I am guessing it is not and never was the plan, we just got lucky for a while. What is more: I feel pretty sure that whatever question you might think up, Jeff has a definite answer to it — it may not be published (and perhaps never will be) but he knows. It would require heroic restraint for the worldbuilders to refrain from detailing the most interesting part of their world — and this being Glorantha, expect dense cross-hatching. (And if it turns out that the Lunars were more interesting before the detail was filled in … ouch!) Maybe — and on this, as on so many things, I am no expert — it would be commercial suicide for a mainstream RPG to embrace wholeheartedly a “Lunar Lacuna”. Still I remain curious as to what the Lunar cults book will contain — although if it were anything earthshaking, I guess the people who’ve seen previews would have shrieked about it here. And if it is far too late to hope for truly blank lands, I still have a little faith that Chaosium will not scribble over the Fourth Age — that there will never be canon on what happens after Argrath nukes the sandpit. What is the rôle of Gloranthan lore and how much of it do we need? Is consistency in lore a virtue? I guess whatever answers I might come up with would be very wrong.

Although the idol is neither little nor yellow, the cover always reminds me of dodgy old J M Hayes and his dodgy old performance piece. I guess it was supposed to and to indicate the true fate of every RPG character: no apotheosis, just extrajudicial capital punishment for their first blasphemy. He may have been a racist, misogynist, and anti-semite (or what’s worse: willing to exploit those traits in others for cash), but he had some fairly sensible — if pat, rehearsed, and “cynical” advice for GMs and writers of lore. Or we could have ten volumes on the religious and mythological context of the idol of the little yellow god. (It’ll turn out that the god was neither small, nor golden, just the idol, because … you know … reasons.)

[Nysalor outside talker comes to town and starts to pitch.] There are various things that might be meant by calling the difference between life and death an illusion (many of which I will not have thought of): You cannot divide the world into the alive and the dead: if you have a reason to put something in one category, you have the same reason to put it in the other (at least, if you are seeing things clearly); Life and death individually are illusions, bogus notions: “There ain’t no such thing as life, and there ain’t no such thing as death, neither, young feller”; It is not that there is no difference between life and death, it is just that the difference is not important, because they are both illusions ( = temporary reality) and only truth ( = permanent reality) matters; “Nothing ever was, anyway” — Annette Peacock None of these seems in any obvious way to motivate suicide. The third is the one that looks like it might have the seeds of future trouble: if only the eternal verities matter and the phenomenal world is worth nothing, to be ripped like a veil, then you may have little regard for life. But as long as you think death is maya, too, why would dying get you closer to Truth? Of course, if you think the cross/sword and truth belong together, that doesn’t look like something to blame on the Bright One. What is it for the frog pond to be worth nothing “in the grand scheme of things”? Is it just that “thou shalt admire the croaking” is not written in galaxy-high letters across the sky? Well, if it were, what then? Does HPL’s cosmic horror come from the determination to derive ought from is? Are those who fret about nihilistic illuminism those who were overly impressed by the Death of God? Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain — he was never there. All reality is temporary. You cannot rend the veil to reveal the eternal: behind “illusion”, there is only the Void, no pleroma, no fullness, no gleaming godhead. Just … nothing. So if you choose to value something, it will have to be some here-today-gone-tomorrow part of the passing show. The mystic has peeked behind the curtain and seen that the curtain is all we’ve got. If you want frogs, grab that illusory spade and start digging your temporary pond. So are the illuminates in the world but not of it, or should we reserve that slur for those seek their eternal reward in the great beyond? A spectre is haunting Genertela — the spectre of illuminism. All the powers of old Glorantha have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and we are at last compelled to face with sober senses our real conditions of life, and our relations with the Void. [It is not holding together — it doesn’t look like the marks are going for it. Feels in satchel for canisters of anthrax. Reassuringly solid.]

Well, on the one hand: eyes closed; eyes open; eyes thrown in the air and juggled. But on the other, these look like the glyphs used to notate Gloranthan choreography. “Young elf, there’s no need to feel down … It’s fun to stray in the True Illusory Forest.” Or maybe they are pom-poms and that is something by Toni Basil. Pom-poms or no, “Crosseyed and Painless” might soundtrack a Gloranthan rebirth. Well, every boy crazy ’bout a self-made man, no? I feel we are drifting deeper into Gloranthan karaoke: ZeeZee is doing his warm-up exercises. The secret figure? The rune no one is talking about — there being a notable absence of true binary thinking? Negation: ¬ This yields ¬ Some say this means unlawful killing, because it’s murder on the dance floor. But old Bill tells me that scientists have always said there is no such thing as a soul; now they are in a position to prove it. Seems a more usable insight.

Invented by Lodril, if I recall correctly. So — I guess — there are/were agricultural water distribution systems in Dara Happa. Do the Sun Domers get on OK with their “uncle”? Probably best for them if they didn’t spurn his inventions.

An unhealable wound to the foot, eh? Perhaps it is swollen, has an oedema. Perhaps Arkat is Oedipus: keen to find the cause of the plague only to find that he himself is the guilty party.