Aran

Style-wise, I've found that meter matters far more than rhyme - though the latter contributes, of course.

And I'm guessing your packets had to travel uphill both inbound and outbound...

Reading it more closely, I'm somehow stumbling over "from across the distant plains / at the edges of the fields", since it's two headless lines in a row where it otherwise alternates (in fact, this tipped me off to there being an odd number of lines in the first half). Of course, the meter becomes less strict in the second half, so it doesn't stand out much.

❤ The imagery and meter are both great. I don't think of the trochaic tetrameter as particularly breathless; but it does have this rolling and somewhat implacable/inevitable/endless feeling (I also used it in Nightfall for that reason). I looked for examples on Wikipedia, which lists Hiawatha and the Kalevala, some pretty neat works. Tempted to say the Raven (actually octametric) is another example but for line-breaks, since the rhymes divide each sixteen-syllable line in two. Speaking of it, that's one of my favorite poems and hasn't been posted yet, so here goes:

Ditto on that one.

I don't know, you could look it up in da leksicon.

Yes I do! *disappears*

Sy's too awesome to be normal. The internet service in our college (or more precisely, our CS department) is crappy as hell. I know exactly who we are supposed to complain to about this, and have, but it's not helping. See, our department has its own little network center, and provides its own wifi. So the campus network doesn't cover our building. Except our department wifi went down a few weeks ago and apparently nobody has figured out how to fix it (mainly because everyone in charge has an office with landline, and therefore hasn't got it on a high priority). We're left with the shaky campus signal we can get from the next building over.

At literally one game a week, we'll be done in 2015 (if everyone plays one game a week it's closer to six months)

Since we're not on knockout rules; in theory the round should be just a guideline. Matches can happen in any order, and it'll probably take weeks to finish most of them.

I had no idea, but I just remembered hearing these lines near the end of a . Knowing the context makes that scene very powerful.

Beside the Agatha Heterodyne parallels you pointed out in the subsequent post, the "ancient settlers" bit also reminds a bit of Darkover. Ever read it?

Or to get really technical, Latin.

For reference, the original RP: http://pied-piper.ermarian.net/topic/1/3370 A follow-up attempt was made: http://pied-piper.ermarian.net/topic/1/4652

And they hardly ever get romanticized anymore.

At the pace this one is going, it'll last a while yet. I think we're at three out of 132 games, if we're really going to follow a double round robin format.

I'd like to point out a possible bug in the web-chess client: When Black wins, as in both these cases, the game closes with 0-1. The notation was correct when Sylae posted her game against Mosquito Slayer, so it might not happen consistently. But it's more likely that she just put that in manually instead of pasting the PGN output. (Speaking of bugs, the PGN export URLs still show only empty games, as far as I can tell.) http://chess.calref.net/pgn.php?gameID=59

Or endermen. Please see Actaeon's top post.

Kublah Khan by Coleridge: Ozymandias by Percy Shelly. Many soliloquys by Shakespeare and from Goethe's Faust (and Goethe's poems), but I can't currently point to any particular favorites by the former, and the latter doesn't usually translate into English well. But anyway: I've written some stuff myself, but it isn't really up for quoting here. Part of it is archived on Shadow Vale. ... oh, I actually like this one. Forgot I'd written anything like it. In other news, I still can't type Shadow Vale without typing Shadow Value^H^He. My fingers have a built-in autocomplete.

It is possibly a bogus feature. http://www.devfuse.com/forums/topic/7312-anchor-links/

Quite well-written, but since when was Hawthorne insane? I admit to having played only E:EFTP and A1, but I recall that he was brilliant and totally ruthless.

Well, I can see why; I see no way to avoid mate in 2-3 moves...

Is there stuff missing or did MosquitoSlayer resign? (I'm not so familiar with PGN.)

You lasted two moves longer than I did in my last match against Sylae.

As not-a-lawyer, I get the impression that legal systems are very close to immeasurably vast, ancient and undocumented software projects. Written by committees over generations, full of convoluted code nobody understands, in outdated language, largely surpassed by and poorly applicable to modern situations, and full of complicated cross-references and contradictions. (Okay, so kind of like religious texts.) In a metaphor that is probably ludicrously divorced from reality: Letting corporations implement the Sueable interface from scratch might have been too difficult, so they extended the abstract LegalPerson class instead.