Student of Trinity

I'm hoping to do a masters course in either critical theory or twentieth-century literature, though I'll have nine months between finishing one course and hopefully starting the other.

The subjects are certainly interesting, but I'm curious as to what exactly you want to get out of a formal course on them, as opposed to just reading in your spare time on your own, or joining a book club. What's the interest in the course as such? The credential? Expert instruction in person rather than in book form?

Higher education is changing, and I've thought a fair bit about how it might change in physics. I'm not sure everything that's currently an on-campus course, or a course at all, should stay as that. I wonder about the humanities as well.

The shocking thing about teaching is that results do not correlate well with effort. You can put in hours and hours of preparation for a lecture and have it go badly in every way. The students are bored at the time and none of them ever learns much from it that they wouldn't have learned otherwise. Or you can whip something up in a few minutes and see it take off.

The trick my wife discovered was to make the students do more of the work. In-class discussions and debates are so awesome, they ought to be illegal. You spend about fifteen minutes thinking up some good topics, while drinking a beer. You take an hour or so to post a list of good references for the students to consult. Then you're set for the week. The students will get into it to an astonishing degree, especially if you've chosen cool topics and references, because this kind of thing is what students think college education is supposed to be about. They've been waiting to do this, through every lecture they've attended.

All you have to do, during the class, is inject a few comments from your own background knowledge. You'll appear much more impressively erudite than in a lecture, where you still have to cover the parts that don't really make sense to you either, because when you don't know what to say, you can just keep mum. The students will think you're a deity of higher education. You'll work two hours a week, outside class.

Okay, it's not quite that great. You can't quite pull the same trick every time. But you can really do it a lot. Lampshade it, tell the students loudly that this is your advanced concept of learning.

If you're having trouble getting discussions going, I can offer an exercise that I invented myself. It's a kind of homework assignment, that you do have to grade. Each student has to submit an 'idealized transcript' of the actual classroom discussion. They are supposed to quote selectively and to paraphrase, to make a coherent discussion. And they are allowed to inject fictitious comments from themselves — things they should have said in class, but didn't — for up to 50% of the text they hand in. The lines they attribute to others, however, must be basically accurate. So you have to take decent notes yourself, so that you can judge accuracy fairly when you grade.

The grade should reflect both accuracy in representing what people really said, and coherence and substance of the discussion in the transcript as written. You might need to hand back one week's assignments giving nobody more than 4/5, just because the discussion that took place was too shallow. Fidelity alone should not be enough for an A. Length can be short, at least at first — a page or two.

In my experience, even fairly slow classes get the idea pretty quickly, and it makes for quite interesting discussions. Somebody says something that seems intelligent or interesting, and there's a pause while everybody scribbles it down. It really makes the students listen to each other. The main problem is that the discussion can remain coherent but go off the rails. The students may end up having a vigorous debate that is based on totally false assumptions. So you do need to moderate, and you need to provide references in advance so that they can arrive at least minimally informed.

The Black Company was really pretty striking when it first came out. It was gritty fantasy, and also quirky in a way that reinforced the grittiness — odd details turned out to be vitally important, even though they didn't seem as though they obviously had to be. That could have come out as stupidly arbitrary, but it somehow made it over a threshold and worked, at least for me, as the brute facts of life not being tailored to human expectations. You ended up taking things a lot more seriously just because of how odd they seemed. I guess it's because a lot of very important details in the real world are things you'd never have expected, or could easily have overlooked. Cook managed to get enough grit in the story for the quirkiness to seem like added realism.

For instance, learning a person's true name was terribly important, just as in lots of stories; the quirky bit was that true names were things like Mary Smith, and you found them out by looking up old birth certificates, or something. Could have been dumb, but it worked; figuring out people's original given names wound up being a more gripping quest than any search for mystic runes or magic gems.

I agree that at some point the series went downhill, but I don't remember just when that was, for me. I think part of it was a weird form of villain creep. Characters that had been mere mini-bosses in the first trilogy somehow morphed into worse things than their original dread overlords had ever been. It wasn't blatantly inconsistent in terms of in-world rules — I'm sure there was some passable excuse — but it was pretty brutally inconsistent in flavor and style. Like some Gran Moff from Revenge of the Jedi appearing in Episode 7 as ten times the badass Darth Vader ever was.

Otherwise, even the first three volumes might not be as impressive now as they seemed at the time, simply because I think a lot of people have copied the look and feel of the Black Company, at least to some extent, and it doesn't seem so original any more. But I think it really was.

Evil is an arbitrary thing, or, at best, purely semantics.

No.

I always thought the Awakened were doomed. I think it's symbolic that Ell-Rah's tomb is infested by a demon. They were a nice bunch of guys all by themselves on Sucia Island, but they are just not up for prime time on the mainland. In a way their moderate path gets re-invented by Astoria in G5, which is a nice way to round out the series, but I doubt Astoria would have come to her way of thinking if the rebellion hadn't gotten very much more horrendous than the Awakened could ever have managed.

And it looks happy doing it! Oh the tiny little humanity.

I refrain from posting images out of consideration for He Who Must Not Be Named Arancaytar, but we may all pause respectfully to remember that some spiders are hairy.

Ha — both the Grail and the Silmarils are great examples.

@Jewels: Have you ever read the novels of Charles Williams? I think Eerdmanns reprinted them some years ago. He had a couple of odd McGuffins, including the Grail itself in one book. Unfortunately the only other thing I distinctly remember about that book was that the protagonist was an archdeacon. It's got to be one of the most exciting books about archdeacons ever written. Williams was a buddy of C.S. Lewis, though I think I might agree with Tolkien in thinking Williams was somehow a slightly sinister influence on Lewis. There's something a little creepy in his mysticism. Of his seven novels, probably the best were All Hallows' Eve and Many Dimensions.

This is a great idea and I wish I had time for it right now, but I just don't. A month from now should be different, so I'd like to record a sort of vote in favor of the continuing series, for what that may be worth. I like all of the entries so far very much. I have to say that I am particularly taken with Alorael's picture of alien contact as ultimately banal. It's shocking, yet immediately compelling. Suddenly it seems like the default scenario.

A wizard did it.

I really wouldn't like to meet one of those in a dark alley.

Spoken like a living tool.

Congratulations on your N years of continuous uptime. May N continue to be incremented, and may your operations succeed with every iteration.

this post has made me want to rewatch The Fifth Element

That's what I was also thinking of but didn't notice that I was.

Sorry about that.

Mmmmmyeahhhh .... but they don't actually go out and bang on any doors. Maybe we can tentatively define a Goduffin. People don't look for it or fight over it, but they make a lot of fuss about it, and yet it still doesn't really matter what it is. A lot of 'evil menace' scenarios end up being like this. Some pretty implausible 'bad thing' looms as a threat over an entire book or movie, and motivates a lot of very active activity, but it's never really anything in particular.

The best example that springs to mind is maybe the Dolman, from Eric van Lustbader's Sunset Warrior series. It's this super bad cosmic badness thing entity villain whatever, and it looms as a threat for most of three books. When it finally shows up, it just dies, within about half a page ... and it never does become any more definite than a thing/entity/whatever. That's a classic Goduffin, I'd say.

My memory is that the Dolman anticlimax didn't actually seem so anticlimactic when I read it, but I was young and undemanding at the time. In retrospect the whole series went steadily downhill from a promising start that just couldn't be sustained. As many series do.

Is Godot, then, a MacGuffin?

I think you have to look for a Maguffin. You can't just wait for it.

Eat the Fig Newtons. All you really need is duct tape. Brush your teeth.

I think we should allow objects that function as maguffins even if they do also do something else. The strict maguffin is a role without a character, but objects with definite characteristics can be overwhelmed by their role, like a mediocre actor starring in a save-the-world plot. Or they can be unfired guns, whose significant characteristics somehow never actually come into play significantly, leaving maguffinage as the only actual effect. This is a broadening of the concept, but I think it's worth doing.

My 'Mornington Crescent' comment was just that claiming the One Ring here is like winning Mornington Crescent on the first move. I mean, well.

@Alorael: Mornington Crescent.

I have a distinct feeling that I'm forgetting at least one totally awesome Maguffin, even apart from the One Ring.

For my own choice I'm going to have to go with Stormbringer, the nasty black sword that kind-of belonged to Elric of Melniboné. I feel it stands out for a sort of second-order intensity of maguffinage. Stormbringer was cool, then went over the top into outright cheesiness, but then persisted until it became cool in some perverse sense once more. With strange eons, even cheese may die.

I created a maguffin myself, once, for a long D&D campaign. It was inspired by a useless but wicked-looking little boot knife owned by some guy I knew in the army once. So it was a small, thin, leaf-shaped dagger, of weird black metal. It was called Heart's Venom, and had properties calculated to impress.

It was inherently venomous, to the degree that if a character was so much as touched in an extremity, then instant amputation of the limb would allow a saving throw versus poison at -5. Otherwise, rapid death with no chance to save. Touching the hilt was as bad as being scratched by the blade. Bad knife = bad.

If you cut yourself with Heart's Venom and survived — which would normally require a double amputation and good luck — you could control the artifact. This conferred an immediate gain of twelve levels of magic-user ability, and if this put you over 18th level, a special ninth-level spell that required Heart's Venom as a material component, and that allowed the crafting of small private universes ('carving reality'). Exactly what that meant was never really pinned down, but it was intended to be pretty mind-boggling. Regrowing some hands was presumably easy, then, though no doubt they would turn out to be demonic alien members that looked like glass filled with smoke, or something, and would never be apt to any end but evil.

In this campaign, most of the most powerful NPCs were below 18th level, so a twelve-level boost would really make a demi-god. Heart's Venom had no other useful powers, though. Despite its poison, it was never intended to be particularly effective as a weapon. It was only three inches long, and I think it was supposed to be mysteriously clumsy as a fighting knife, or something.

At the time of the campaign, it was the most prized item in the hoard of a two-hundred-yard-long black dragon who slept in a cave under the center of a swamp the size of a small ocean. A 19th level thief eventually dug through two feet of big diamonds to steal the thing, from under the dragon's eye. It came in a tasteful little presentation box. It played a key role in a climactic scene, and was then immediately hauled off to heaven by an ascending saint. And that was a wrap.

n recent Spiderweb games, the general problem with an inappropriately designed party is not that it can't make progress but that it does so incredibly slowly and tediously. ... The game becomes tedious and not fun if you design your party wrong, but you may not ever know that that's what the problem is, because you can still keep going.

This is an interesting but dismaying observation. It's something that's going to be hard for Jeff to fix, I think. Too many of his beta testers are old hands who know the ropes, or else are gluttons for punishment and may not complain when they should. And even if beta testers could convey the problem clearly to the maker of the games, it might just be too much work to fix it. So Jeff may not really want to fix it, if he's doing well enough as it is. Spiderweb doesn't even try to sell games to people who really want cutting edge graphics. It may also be that Spiderweb also just lets a lot of other customers go, who would have stuck around if everything were better balanced. Maybe achieving really thorough balance is just as unfeasible, with a small company, as cutting edge graphics.

True fact (unlike the miserable false facts that you read in those other posts): dyes used to be big business. Humans didn't have a lot of ways of producing durable colors in cloth until the later 19th century. One of the few good dyes available in medieval Europe was woad, which produced a decent blue color. Woad is a little weedy plant with yellow flowers, and the process of turning it into blue dye involved a lot of urine.

I've visited a town that was rich from woad in the middle ages. Somehow they cornered the trade. I don't know whether they grew especially good woad plants, or whether they jealously guarded some secret of the production process. One possibility, though, is that everyone else was content to leave the woad-making to them. They collected every citizen's urine in huge vats, throughout the year, and stored it in warehouses until the woad harvest. The tour guide assured us that the whole town used to stink unrighteously. I don't know how he would have really known that for sure, but as historical reconstructions go, it sounds like a good bet.

I'm very sorry to hear this sad news. Everyone dies, but this sounds like one of the harder ways to do it. Your care will have made an incredible difference to your mother, though, even if her brain hasn't been in shape to let you know this. It's a lot easier to face hard things when you're not alone.

I think maybe the surreal thing about death is that it's all too real. It's so different from life as we get used to it, yet when it comes it doesn't go away. It can make everything else — everything — seem fake.

But even silly things like computer games, and message boards about them, are actually real, too, at least in their way. If we've helped you at all in coping with some hard parts of the rest of reality, then that's really great. Thanks for letting us know.

I would live in Avernum and set up a shop selling unsellable trowels.

I think your business plan may need some work.

I think I'd go for Avernum, but in the era between A5 and A6, when you can go back out to the surface after a while. I'd like to explore the caves. I like caves. I'd like to figure out some way of not worrying about monsters, though. Hire a high level party as porters, for instance.

I could see Arolael as Glahdring.

FYT.

MMXPERT can be a boat creation, because he started this.

Woo-hoo — we get to claim Gazer. Because we're short-sighted and obsessive.

The eye is having a tough time topping the door creature for ADOS. That's a clever one, and now that he's said it, we can't think of anything better.