Day of laughs

[altivo]

Cynical laughs, maybe, but laughs nonetheless.

Started with the gallery, where we had a guild meeting followed by award presentations by the judge, who talked about her reasoning and used a number of items as examples, including one of mine. (No, she did not give me an award.) As I predicted, her orientation was like that of the last three or four judges they've had, very much toward high fashion clothing. I'm not the only one in the group who just doesn't do that, but all of us are still a minority. This is compensated by the fact that I received lots of compliments from fellow members on all three of my woven pieces (and my former boss has offered twice to buy one of them, she likes it so much.) The three pieces are nicely displayed in prominent spaces and lighting, and I'm happy with that.

Amusement continued at the library. The backup jobs that had been failing for a while and I got them going again by splitting them into two jobs are failing again. Someone is literally filling every empty kilobyte of server space with files, though I can't yet tell who it is or which files are causing the problem.

A door that is supposed to be kept locked when the room isn't in use but is always forgotten and left unlocked has developed a new kink. It's one of those double doors where one door has to be latched with a bolt into the dooframe at the top, and the other locks with a key that drives a deadbolt into the other door. Now they keep locking the key without bolting the stationary door, which is completely ineffective. Both open at a slight push.

Best, though, is that ridiculous credit card terminal. Not only does it persist in arguing that its security certificate has been tampered with, but it can't remember the date. I glanced at it this evening, and it said 01/02/80. I forced it to reboot just to see what would happen and it came back with a date in May of 2016. I left it there, since at least it can't be used that way. Any credit card presented will be declared "expired" and refused. I have gone from zero confidence in the banks and credit card system responsible for this fiasco to a negative value somewhere approaching absolute zero. I may yet win my argument that we should forget the whole thing and send the trash back where it came from. They obviously have no idea what they're doing or how to set this up.

I've come up with a third Halloween display category to add to the "Ghost Writers" and "Zombie Writers." It's "Zombie series" for series of books that have been declared finished and then revived and more books added by either the original author or someone else. Mercedes Lackey has just released a second new Valdemar book after saying five or six years ago that she was done with the series. Frank Herbert may be dead, but his Dune series lives on and keeps reproducing. Older examples include The Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries, both of which continued to add new books long after the original authors passed on to their just rewards (or punishment.) Asimov's Foundation books have suffered a similar fate, I think. So have John Ludlum's pseudo-military suspense stories. One of the silliest is Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's trilogy, which he pushed to five books himself, while still alive, and now that he's gone, Eoin Colfer has produced the sixth by pulling it out of a hat (or perhaps out of some other place.)

I saw more honeybees in the butterfly garden outside the staff kitchen than I have seen all summer. They are coming to the New England asters, which are very prolific this year. Though I often say that I dislike the color purple, I'll make an exception for those.

Comments

[schnee]

I've come up with a third Halloween display category to add to the "Ghost Writers" and "Zombie Writers." It's "Zombie series" for series of books that have been declared finished and then revived and more books added by either the original author or someone else.

Oh, that's a good term. I've read books like that — ones which were obviously not intended to have sequels, but where the author was persuaded when it sold well to continue after all and extract more money from the market. I don't mind this if it's done well, but if it's painfully obvious that a book is wrestling a story that doesn't want to be continued into submission until it gives up, as it were, then that's something I tend to frown upon.

Of course, those authors that don't manage to pull off unplanned sequels smoothly are often those that fail to develop an engaging style with believable characters and a world that seems natural as well, so it's often an indicator that there's no use in bothering to keep on reading. (Although this isn't always true, either.)

[hrrunka]

McCaffrey's Pern is the other series on my shelves that seems to go on and on and on, but it hasn't been declared complete.

[altivo]

Yep. She's still alive as far as I know, but her son has taken over the writing. I wasn't at all excited by the first one he did, so I've stopped buying them.

[hrrunka]

I reverted to waiting for paperbacks about half a dozen Pern books back. I fear I may buy the new Lackey, though.

The trouble with both those universes is that they're limited, and after a while each new story begins to feel like another slight twist on one of the previous stories even when it isn't a straight re-telling of a previous story from a different character's viewpoint.

By way of a contrast, I just finished reading Terry Pratchett's latest, I Shall Wear Midnight.

[altivo]

I bogged down early on Tiffany Aching and haven't finished any of them. Now if they were about Granny Weatherwax as a child, it might be different...

As for Lackey, I don't care for any of her other series, or for the ones she co-wrote with Larry Dixon, but the Valdemar stories have continued to improve in quality and complexity I thought. Exile's Honor and Exile's Valor were really good, and I enjoyed the jump back in time for Foundation. I have Intrigues sitting at home but haven't started it yet.

[hrrunka]

With Valdemar, mostly, I've found the single books more enjoyable than the trilogies. I can easily drop into Pern whenever a new book comes my way. I don't usually have any trouble getting through Terry Pratchett's books, though Unseen Academicals took a while, mainly because its threads were fashion and football, neither of which I find particularly interesting. Tiffany, on the other hand, lives on The Chalk, and there's chalk downland really not very far from here; I'd almost half expect to meet her while out for a walk...

[altivo]

Well, Valdemar is uneven. I agree about the single books being better, but those are the later ones as well, and she has been improving and writing to a more mature audience, much as Marion Zimmer Bradley did over the years. Take a Thief and Brightly Burning were both excellent.

Pratchett has had many ups and downs for me. I really enjoyed Going Postal but nothing since then has seemed as good. Small Gods and Pyramids might be my next favorites, closely followed by The Truth and Thief of Time. I tend to like the supporting cast more than the main characters: Granny Weatherwax, Carrot, Angua, Gaspode, Ridcully, and so forth. Some of his jokes, like the "Scone of Stone," for instance, are hilarious even at the third or fourth reading, but others fall flat the first time through. The concept of Igors is great, but his vampires are stereotypically dull. ;D

I guess there are some areas in North America that resemble The Chalk, but nowhere around here. They'd probably be in the southwest or out in the great plains. The native legends have less to do with fairies and little people and a lot more to do with intelligent and powerful animals and even trees. I rather like that but we don't see nearly as much literature about them. I've tried writing drips and drabs myself, but of course if it isn't erotica it doesn't find much traction in the furry world and it's too exotic for the mundane world.

[hrrunka]

A rich cast of supporting characters certainly adds to a story, and Pratchett has quite a large set of them. Thankfully, come Discword Con, that also means that there're a good variety of costumes on show, and less than half a dozen Rincewinds and Twoflowers.

I guess, just as Pratchet draws on European culture, myth and folklore, Lackey's drawn more heavily on natice North American culture. It took me quite a while to figure out from whence the Shin'a'in and Tayledras came; for quite a while I pictured the Shin'a'in as somewhat akin to modern nomadic Mongolians...

[altivo]

The resemblance between Asian nomadic cultures and North American is pretty strong, so Lackey might be drawing on either or both. I believe physiological and DNA studies have shown a connection, but it separated so long ago that the languages aren't very similar at all.

[hrrunka]

I got the impression the Shin'a'in have a horse-centred nomadic lifestyle, and Mongolian nomads came to my mind first. I do wonder a little how the American plains natives lived before the horse was introduced.

[altivo]

We know a fair amount about that. The plains tribes had dogs, but not horses. They had no word for horse in their language.

The introduction of the horse caused massive changes to the social structure, of course. Some of it had to be guessed or reconstructed, but quite a bit has historical documentation.

The plains groups (as opposed to the pueblo builders of the southwest) were nomadic even before they had the horse. They traveled on foot, and used dwellings (the tipi or teepee) that could be partly transported and rebuilt using local materials as supports. They used dogs as beasts of burden, and created the travois for use with dogs long before they used it with horses. They were a stone age culture with respect to tools, and had the bow but not the wheel. They were not at all lacking in intelligence, though, and contact with the more technologically advanced Europeans produced a huge cultural shock as new technology and implements were quickly adopted but clashed with their complex traditions. Plains Indians were much closer to the old hunter-gatherer societies than were the natives of either coast where agriculture had become well accepted and eliminated most nomadic practices.