The Witching Well

Travian seems innocuous enough at first glance. It’s a war game with a dash of something that tastes a bit like SimCity or Civilization. The graphics are kind of cute, even. You develop your fields. You build your buildings. You train your troops. Slowly, very slowly, over days, you grow. You get raided by larger villages. You raid smaller ones. If you survive, maybe you join an alliance. And off in the distant future (months and months, if you’re playing on a new or newly-rebooted server) the end of the world is coming. Where will you be when it all shakes out in the end?

I’m on both Server 4 and Server 5, if anyone else wants to come and play.

Mood: enthralled
Music: the cat's snoring

Really fun little meme I’ve seen around lately. Most recently over on Whistling in the Dark.

The rules:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The first article title on the page is the name of your band.

http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.

http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/
The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Using your favorite graphics program combine these three elements to design your album cover and post the result.

Here’s mine:

Mood: amused

When I fall for a book — I mean when a book really sinks its claws into me — you can tell by the way I read it. I devour the first three-quarters of the story at breakneck pace, using any excuse to stick my nose into it, even if it’s just for ten minutes. Or two. And then I get to a point where I realize that there are only a few chapters left, and I start to dawdle.

It’s kind of painful, really. I desperately want to know what happens next, but I know that every page brings me closer to the end. And I don’t want it to end.

Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint did that to me. I fell head over heels for her world, with its layered, corrupt society, her airy nobles with their convoluted manipulations, her scruffy thieves and whores. And the social system that supports the profession of her main character: the swordsman Richard St Vier. Who is well worthy of falling for, too.

Mood: enthralled

It seems that the younger generation in Baltimore is organically creating something that a lot of people have been trying to shoehorn into the English language for a long time now: an epicene (gender-neutral) third-person singular pronoun.

Mark Liberman over at Language Log has written a fascinating post on it.

Of course, there’s the problem that “yo” and “you” might become confused, which makes me think that this probably won’t ultimately have any more staying power than “thon” or “co” or any of the others that people have tried to artificially inject into the language over the years.

But maybe I’m wrong. The “sie/hir” construction seems to be fairly popular in certain online circles (though I find “zie/zir” less likely to confuse and less evocative of the German feminine pronoun “sie”).

And, truly, in an age when you can have conversations with and about a person without ever knowing either their biological sex or their gender orientation, when we’re beginning to realize that intersexed people are far more common than many would like to admit, when the word “genderqueer” can become a useful term, you have to admit that sooner or later we’re going to have to change the language to handle our broadened perceptions and our technological advances.

Mood: thoughtful

Friends are for having things that you would love to have, but that you have the good sense not to. Like video gaming systems that you know would suck all the time out of your life. Andy and I visited friends like this over the weekend. Kate and George have X-Box 360. They have Guitar Hero II.

I can now almost play Cheap Trick’s Surrender on Easy level. Kate, on the other hand, is working on Trogdor.

Mood: pleased