ÿþ<HEAD> <title>Eric's Archive</title> <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Eric's Journal, the irregularly updated journal of Eric Lis"> <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="eric, lis, emperor, aerica, aerican, journal, eric's head"> </HEAD> <left><font face="Times New Roman"> <font face="Monotype Corsiva,Bernhard Modern Roman,Unicorn,BellGothic,News Gothic MT"> <center> <big><big><big><big> Eric's Archive<br> Entries 481-490<P> </big></big></big></big></font> <I> Those who forget the past<Br> Are doomed to reread it.<p></i> </center> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/index.html">More recent</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/491-500.html">Entries 491-500</a><BR> <a href="#490">Entry 490</a> June 19 2008<br> <a href="#489">Entry 489</a> June 13 2008<br> <a href="#488">Entry 488</a> June 10 2008<br> <a href="#487">Entry 487</a> June 7 2008<br> <a href="#486">Entry 486</a> June 4 2008<br> <a href="#485">Entry 485</a> June 1 2008<br> <a href="#484">Entry 484</a> May 29 2008<br> <a href="#483">Entry 483</a> May 26 2008<br> <a href="#482">Entry 482</a> May 23 2008<br> <a href="#481">Entry 481</a> May 20 2008<br> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/401-500/471-480.html">Entries 471-480</a><BR> <a href="http://www.aericanempire.com/eric/archive.html">Archive</a><BR> </blockquote> <HR> <a name="490"></a> <U><B>My True Lovecraft Gave To Me</b></u><p> This story was sold to Weird Tales Magazine on September 9th, 2008, and has therefore been removed from the public archive for copyright reasons. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="489"></a> <U><B>Recurring Themes, Recurring</b></u><p> On June 10th, just shy of the age of thirty two, Alexander the Great died. He was a great man -- he had studied at the feet of Aristotle himself, was said to have never been defeated in battle, and before getting his first gray hair had conquered most of the known world (there wasn't as much known world back then as there is now, but still, it's impressive). None the less, this great man, this leader, this supreme ruler of all he surveryed, snuffed it, and historians disagree only as to whether he died a drooling tachypnic wreck secondary to malaria, or if he drowned in his own vomit following a bout of binge drinking. This has nothing to do with anything else, but it sure is food for thought.<P> Today, because the weather was quite lovely, one of my norally indoor lectures suddenly became an outside lecture, as the students and teacher decided that it would be nice to spend two hours in the fresh air rather than in a stuffy ol' conference room. Much to my surprise, it turns out that on the eighth floor of the Montreal Children's Hospital, just past the trauma department, there's actually a huge outdoor park built on the roof, high enough up that you can see for miles in every direction with only a handful of sky scrapers tall enough the ruin the view. The park has walls less than a foot high, and all the rest of the sides and roof are clear plastic (with air holes) or, starting about twelve feet up, netting. There's a small jungle gym for the relatively healthy children to play on, benches and chairs for people to relax, and several themed play areas. A number of bricks walls have large, beautifully-painted murals donated by local artists, and the areas of the park that aren't covered in semi-bouncy rubberish fakestone are actually covered in astroturf. The overall effect is really quite remarkable -- one might even say striking. The first moment when I walked out of the building and into this part was, in fact, one of those very rare moments; as a Vorlon might say, it was one moment (pause for dramatic effect) of perfect beauty. To top it all off, the park itself has a big, friendly sign that proclaims its name, the Parc en Ciel, The Park in the Sky -- which for the benefit of those reading this who don't speak French is actually a very clever and playful pun on the French word for rainbow.<P> My appreciation for this marvelous and fantastic place diminished rapidly in the face of the blazing sun shining down on me, searing the meat from my bones, burning my skin, measurably increasing my cancer risk, and reflecting of the white papers of ten students for the cumulative effect of mimicking snow-blindness. It goes without saying, when the rest of my group decided to go outside, I would have voted that we stay indoors if not for my fear of being torn limb-from-limb.<P> This is one of the things I've been rediscovering, now that I'm walking between ten to thirty minutes to get from my apartment to whichever hospital I'm at on a given day. When I was in CEGEP, I took the bus to school, and it was only about a five minute walk to and from the bus stop, usually before 7am or after four pm when the Earth was relatively cool. When I was an undergrad, and for my first two years in medical school, I drove to school. For the whole of this academic year, on the other hand, I've walked to three of the hospitals and taken the bus to two others; the bus stop and the nearest of the five teaching hospitals are all at least ten minutes walk away, with the Children's Hospital being the farthest one at a twenty minute walk there (or a thirty minute walk back; I've never figured out how that works). I've walked this walk under the blazing August sun. I've walked this walk in the depths of winter when the hydrogen condensed out of the air and the snow mountains I had to climb were over twelve feet high (this last part, I kid you not, is not an exageration or a lie). I've walked this walk in rain so heavy I couldn't see ten feet in front of me. I've walked this walk in every weather, in every season, and in every month, and I have learned this: <P> <blockquote> I thought I hated the heat, but that was before I spent half an hour walking uphill in thirty degree celcius weather with the sun directly overhead while carrying a thirty pound backpack. Now I see that I didn't really hate the heat last year... I was merely annoyed by it. This year, this year I truly truly hate the heat. I loathe the heat with every fiber of my being and by all the names of every god of light and darkness. I hate the heat so much that I speak four of the most poetic and evocative languages in the world and none of them have the words to express the depths of my revulsion. I hate I hate I hate the heat.<BR> </blockquote> And it's not even mid June yet. You don't want to hear what I think of the weather outside come July.<P> I can just picture, somebody reading this is going to want to be clever. They'll say, "you think thirty degrees is bad? Hey man, where I live, we hit thirty in early spring. When we hit forty the guys're just startin' to feel warm, and we don't even bother to refrigerate the beer until we hit fifty. Up North where you are and livin' in the city, you don't get real heat." These are all good points, to which I reply, "that's why I live here, you dolt."<P> Tommorow's going to be a high of twenty six degrees. I can survive twenty six... it's only a ten minute walk to and from the hospital where I am tommorow, and it's only uphill on my way there in the morning, before it gets too hot out. When I get home, my air conditioner will have been running all day, and even if my apartment is twenty three or twenty four it'll feel pretty good in comparisson. Next week's looking to be cool and rainy, lovely weather by my standards. Sooner or later, that sun's gonna come back out, though, and when it does... well, as I said around this time last year, oh mighty sun, I hate you so damn much. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="488"></a> <U><B>The Most Remarkable Word I've Ever Seen</b></u><p> It's long been a complaint of mine that I haven't got enough letters after my name. This has felt like a problem to me since before I started university, which is arguably when I started taking the most concrete (if time-consuming) steps to fix the problem, but it's really seemed to get worse and worse in the years since I began to hand out business cards. I have very pretty business cards, artfully layed out and with a tastefully understated "fnord" hidden in the background, but it suffers in so far as that my name hasn't got enough titles on it. I've always felt it would be far too silly to write "BSc" after my name, because in most academic fields, a BSc these days is nothing more than a transitory step towards something else. I regret not having gotten a master's degree, only because MSc or MA would have been something sufficiently advanced that I could print it after my name, and as an added bonus, three years post-university, I'd have already finished the degree and had my title. Instead, I'm left with nothing at the moment. I do have the prospect of getting to add four letters to my name -- M.D. C.M. -- in less than two years time, but two years is a long way away, and I'll have affixed my signature to a lot of documents and handed out a lot of business cards between now and then. Maybe it's the academic in me, maybe it's the egoist, or maybe it's just the liar, but I wish I had letters after my name right now.<P> The astute among you might at this point ask if I should be satisfied to at least have the H.I.M. My response is that H.I.M. comes before my name, not after. All really dignified letters come after. <P> To be wholly honest, I'm not really 100% sure why I even feel the need to affix letters to my name. As it is, one of the best things about my name, aside from it being poetic, charming, sibilant, meaningful, memorable, honourable and all 'round nifty, is that it's short. It's quick to say and easy to write. The trouble with short words is that, inconceivable as it may seem, the more letters you add to them, the longer they get, and so eventually they stop being short at all (at which point I'd be left with a name that's merely poetic, charming, sibilant, meaningful, memorable, honourable and all 'round nifty). The truth is, I'd miss having such a short, easily written name, but i9t's always seemed to me that the benefits of the extra letters makes up for the disadvantages. For example, let's be honest: I do a lot of weird, some might say crazy stuff, like dedicating myself to world conquest and publically announcing when I declare war on the entire Universe. The trouble with doing crazy stuff is that a certain percentage of the people around you -- a small, usually unimportant percentage usually, but still potentially armed -- will tend to conclude that you, yourself, are crazy, and thus of limited intelligence or deserving of being laughed at (instead of with). It's an unfounded leap of logic to make for at least eight serious and well-reasoned reasons, but obviously, these people aren't the sort to bother with such minutiae as reason. Having some respectable letters after your name helps alleviate such situations; an MD after your name clears up a lot of annoyances, as does a PhD to a lesser extent (since the problematic people we're discussing may be those of limited respect for education in the first place). If you've got a string of letters after your name -- ideally, about half of them forming recognizable and respectable titles and the other half being unidentifiable but hinting at power, authority, and brilliance -- then anything you say or do has greater weight in the minds of many if not most people, and even the seemingly stupidest ideas can gain credence and respect in the popular media, as we can see from an even cursory examination from the portrayal of all the pseudoscience average Westerners believe in. So, while I'd enjoy having more postnomials and titles to my name for the respect and for the prestige, I'd be lying if I claimed it wasn't mostly as a blunt tool to control the hearts and minds of those around me.<P> For better or worse, though, I'd classically refrained from making up titles and adding them to my name. It'd be all too easy to make up a few postnomials and use them; with a minimum of effort, for example, I could be a <B>S</B>enior of the <B>I</B>mperial <B>C</B>ouncil for <B>M</B>edicine, <B>M</B>ember of the <B>S</B>ociety for <B>E</B>thics in <B>S</B>cience, or <B>F</B>ellow of the <B>N</B>ational <B>O</B>rganization of <B>R</B>easonable <B>D</B>oubters. The trouble with that is that, thanks be to all the gods, I mostly circulate among educated, widely-read, accomplished people these days. At best, using all those extra letters might prompt people to ask me to explain what FNORD is, and that always leads to trouble. At worst, people might decide to look up what the letters stood for and actually get offended by my using seemingly-fake titles, just because they've worked hard to obtain their own. If they'd looked up all my titles instead of just a few, they might be more understanding... I don't call myself a <B>L</b>eader of the <b>I</b>nterpreters of <b>A</b>mbiguous <b>R</b>eality for nothing.<P> Barring unexpected yet regrettably plausible circumstances, it's likely that by this time in 2010, I'll indeed be a Medical Doctor and Maester of Chiurgery (I'm not making that up -- it's the actual title bestowed by McGill, even to hands like mine), so that'll be a good start and probably last step towards getting the letters I want. In a perfect world, I think I'd actually really like to pursue an MA and PhD in psychology after I finish medicine -- not immediately after, but maybe eight or nine years down the line. Just for the sake of it, there's a big part of me that genuinely just wants to be able to say I have those letters, with the corrolary being that I achieved what they stand for, and yes, I really am that smart. A little voice in the back of my head sometimes tells me this is the wrong reason to want to pursue those letters, and that's why I'll probably never actually make it happen, but still, the idea holds its own appeal. And then, who am I, of all people, to presume to be able to say what the future will hold? Every time I predict my destiny, the Goddess gets that little twitch above her eye...<P> Really, though, if there's one set of letters I want people to one day recognise and fear, it's gotta be the H.I.M. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="487"></a> <U><B>Below The Belt</b></u><p> There's a curious phenomenon that's struck me in the past week while I've been in the hospital. This was a busy week for me in terms of seeing patients; I believe I had more personal, one-on-one contact with patients in the past week than I did in my whole seven weeks of surgical training. On the internal medicine wards, there are certain similarities between patients. For example, when you go to see a patient, you don't need to look at their chart to tell if they're a diabetic -- you can just take it as a given. Similarly, you don't usually have to check to see if a patient has any heart disease -- you can usually just assume it, and then make an effort to keep from looking surprised if a patient denies it. It's a bit harder to guess ahead of time if the patient will be a heavy smoker or drinker, but again, if you choose to err on the same of misanthropy, you'll be right more often than not. These internal medicine wards don't show people off at their best; the people who are here are the ones who are really, sick enough that they couldn't just be given medication and sent home, because under the current Canadian health care system, and particularly at the major Montreal hospitals, you don't stand a chance of getting admitted to the hospital unless your life is in immediate danger and it requires treatment that's literally impossible to offer to an outpatient. There's something else, though, that every patient I see in internal medicine seems to have in common, a collection of factors which together form exactly the sort of coherent picture that I'm being trained to pick up. Every patient I see has a very round face. Every patient is lying in bed, with their legs covered in blankets. Every patient has a realtively high-pitched, breathy voice. Every patient has skin that comes in usual colour, such as interesting shades of red, yellow, green and blue. Finally, every patient seems to have a great deal of difficulty moving under their own power, and when they move, tend to give the impression of being a little bit jerky and a little bit unconrolled, almost like someone was pulling their strings. We put together all of these disparate signs, and the logical mind is left with only one possible conclusin: everybody in the internal medicine wards at the major Montreal hospitals is a muppet.<P> The other day, I had a long conversation with an aquaintance of mine -- one of those people I can't honestly call a "friend" -- wherein, because I don't believe in Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu, he insisted angrily that I'm a skeptic. If he only knew.<P> So: muppets. The truth is unavoidable if you think about it. It's so obvious, it hits you in the head like a boomerang fish. I mean, yes, they teach us that liver disease can cause billirubin backflow, which causes jaundice and yellowing of the skin, but I think a much more logical alternative is that every patient I've seen with "jaundice" is actually a yellow muppet. By the same token, it seems quite clear to me that there's no such thing as cyanosis, but rather "people" made of bluish felt. Surely my professors don't expect me to honestly believe these are real people? If they're real, living people, then we are their legs always covered up, and why are we supposed to go to such lengths to let them modestly cover themselves? Obviously, it's because they're afraid that we'll see the puppeteers. No other explanation makes sense.<p> Some of you must be wondering, I imagine, why there would be entire floors of my local hospitals populated exclusively by muppets. To me, the answer is obvious: it's all for the benefit of medical student training. Not every patient in the hospitals needs to be a muppet, you see. Out of the entire hospital where I've been doing the majority of my Internal Medicine period, my access is basically restricted to three floors, making for a total of thirty to forty patients at maximum. Of these, it's assumed that I'm only every going to be exposed to a fraction of them; as a second-year student, I only ever see patients in two contexts. First, on my own, I see four patients for the purpose of doing a practice physical exam and writing a case report, These patients aren't just any old ones that I pick; these patients must be recommended to me by doctors or third-year medical students, which puts them in the position to always recommend, instead of the real, living patients who are sick and thus don't need to be poked and prodded by annoying medical students, the muppets, who are there solely for the purpose of being present for second-year students. The second context is when I walk through the wards with a supervisor physician, and again, in this case, I'm with a doctor who chooses what bed we're going to walk up to and who we'll speak to, and so has the power to ensure that we only ever go to a bed occupied by a muppet instead of a living, breathing human. No doubt the majority of the beds on the Internal Medicine wards are occupied by real people in need of real medical care, but a certain percentage of the beds, perhaps one in every ten, is actually a muppet. Real people simply don't come in that many unnatural colours, don't have that many tubes sticking out of them in places where they weren't born with holes, and aren't meant to be that squishy when you poke their bellies.<P> The purpose of the muppets: training. We second year medical students have just enough knowledge to make us extremely, some might say supremely deadly. Show me a patient in acute respiratory distress and leave me unsupervised, and I could have them non-breathing within two minutes. In third year, we start learning how to actually fix people, and at that stage our deadliness begins to drop off sharply, but currently, at the end of second year, we know only those things which make people sick and those things that will make them worse than they already are. Obviously, people at my skill level should by no means allowed to go anywhere near an actual patient, but on the other hand, it's vitally important that we learn how to conduct physical exams. The solution to this dilemma is to set up fake, standardized "patients" that the students can examine. These facke patients -- all of them muppets -- have exagerated physical findings for us to learn how to identify, and thus, we can learn what, say, a pansystolic heart murmur sounds like without ever putting us in the position of accidentally blocking off a patient's carotid arteries while trying to feel their pulses. This is the only possibility that makes sense, after all... surely no sane doctor would ever allow someone like *me* to get anywhere near a vulnerable, pre-weakened human.<P> Before you ask, anyone who doesn't believe that muppets can be built to the level of sophistication I'm talking about has never seen Farscape. Medical science ain't got nothin' on the Jim Henson Company. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="486"></a> <U><B>The Suicide Note of Thomas Jefferson</b></u><p> This week, something happened to me. Not just any something, though; this was a bad something, a vile something, a horrible something. This was a something of such utter horribleness and overall badthinghappenness that entirely new words have to be invented to describe it. It was a tragedy, utterly unprecedented in all of recorded history. Ad on top of all that, it was a significant inconvenience.<P> This week, I ran out of books.<P> Under normal circumstances, I keep a pretty good supply of books available at all times. I like to have at least four or five novels in my "to read" pile at all times, so that I always know, not only what I'm going to read next, but how big my pockets will have to be for the book's duration. I do very little novel-reading when I'm at home, you see, because at home, I've got my computer, my comics, movies, toys, and textbooks, but when I'm outside of my home, I haven't got most of that stuff (I do usually have a textbook with me, but it's cumbersome to carry and I can't read it for more than an hour or so at a time), so I need a novel to give me something to do when I'm sitting around and waiting for things, as I find myself frequently having to do. In the last few months, I've had a lot more time to read than I'd expected, however. Over the whole of 2007, I read only about twenty eight or twenty nine books, but this year, because I'm spending my time in the hospitals where I often have multi-hour breaks or have to stand around in a hallway waiting for a teacher to show up, I'm already on book number twenty three, and it's barely even June. The supply of books I had stored up has thus proven woefully inadequate, and I failed to notice how fast my supply was dwindling. When I finished reading <I>They Hunger</i> by Scott Nicholson -- one of the worst books I've ever read, by the way, with actually fairly good writing but such incredibly one-dimensional and universally annoying characters that I wanted to burn the book at the end of every chapter -- I looked at my to-read pile and saw... there was nothing there.<P> That line isn't actually strictly 100% accurate. In fact, there were still four novels in my to-read pile, but they were all parts of extended series from which I have yet to read earlier books, so I don't feel able to start them yet. Had I been truly desperate, I suppose I could have started them, checking Wikipedia synopses in the unlikely event that I'd missed anything in an earlier book that I really really needed to have read to understand the later book, but I hate doing that unless I have to. Fortunately, I did have a choice... I've got a bookcase full of beloved books, many of which I'd only ever read once. Left with no other choice, I took this as motivation to finally reread the Illuminatus! trilogy, which I'd been meaning to do for several years. A day later, I'm glad I made that choice, because I'm enjoying the Illuminatus! quite a lot, and what's more, on the second read-through, the book actually makes sense. Still, <I>The Eye In The Pyramid</i> can't really have been said to have been part of my to-read pile, having been slipped into my backpack more in desperation than anything else. <P> The truth is, I don't really know what I'd do with myself if I didn't have a book. At the hospitals, I regularly have half-hour or one-hour or even four-hour breaks between lectures or duties. Because I've been really trying hard to be a good and proper student, I've actually been spending a fair bit of that time off studying, which is exactly why we're given the long breaks, and to my credit my professors appear to be impressed with my knowledge and I finished my Internal Medicine textbook in near record time. Still, hard as I've worked to improve my study habits in the last three years, I'm still by no means a good worker, and I haven't got what it takes to study for four hours straight. I need a proper book, a completly uneducational book, to break up the periods of learning stuff. More importantly, I spend a certain amount of time in lecture halls and even just standing around in hallways waiting for professors to show up; when I'm waiting with classmates I make an effort to put away my book and socialize -- a feat that once would have been as hard for me as studying for one hour straight -- but when nobody else is around, what else is there to do than read, and I certainly can't carry a heavy textbook with me everywhere I go. I've carried books around with me everywhere I go since I was twelve years old; I've never had to learn how to stand around waiting for something without one, and I don't know how other people do it. I've tried standing and waiting for people when I don't have a book with me, and it's quite intolerable. I become agitated, self-concious, fidgety (even more than usual), and worst of all, bored. I've seen other people sit and wait for long periods of time with no apparent distress and I've got no clue how they do it. Or, for that matter, why, when they could just carry a book with them. Suffice it to say, when I finished <I>They Hunger</i> and before I decided to reread <I>The Eye in the Pyramid</i>, I was faced with the prospect of having to face the next day's total of nearly five hours off scattered throughout the day, the vast majority of which I would surely spend without interesting people to talk to, with no book, and the thought of doing so filled me with dread and horror. It's only fortunate that I never have fewer than three backup plans in place for such crises, and Plan "A" was 306 pages long and would have made Albert Hofmann seriously rethink his life. Plan "B" was by Neil Gaiman.<P> Unsurprisingly, I've already taken steps to keep this from happening again in the too-near future. Even before realising I was so low on books, I'd already placed an order on Amazon for enough books to tide me over for about three months... this crisis simply makes them that much more timely. Even when I bought those books, I was still operating under the assumption that I was averaging about one book every two weeks, which is plainly false given my current rate, so I'll probably plan my next major book purchase for a bit sooner than I otherwise might. I have to plan ahead for next year, of course, when my duties in the hospital will be much less observational and much more hands-on and, in theory, I'll have less time to read, but it's better to have a stockpile of unread books calling your name plaintively than to have a pile of finished books and nothing new to entertain you. Illuminatus! will keep me busy for at least three weeks, and that'll bring me right up to summer vacation, during which my novel-reading will probably drop precipitously for about a month, and by the time my classes resume, I'll be sure to have enough books to keep me occupied for a while. Catastrophes like this occur to remind us of the importance of planning ahead, and also to remind us how grateful we should feel to have good books around to fill the empty hours between seeing friends and checking emails. And to remind us of the importance of buying pants with really big pockets. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="485"></a> <U><B>Burn and Bubble</b></u><p> I like tea. This is a bit odd, since I actually drink tea fairly rarely. I have one or two cups of tea in an average week, mostly only when I have friends over, and then mostly because my friends tend to be very fond of tea. None-the-less, when I moved out, one of the things I decided was that I wanted to have a tea collection -- a section of my cupboard filled to overflowing with all manner of wonderful teas. For various reasons, not the least of which being that I'm both lazy and forgetful, this didn't end up happening for the first six or eight months after I moved, but in the last couple of months I've been working on fixing that oversight. Every week now, when I go do groceries, I buy one box of tea for two or three dollars, always picking up a different flavour. In this way, I've discovered some truly horrible teas, of such vileness that I daren't even write their names here, but I've also found a couple of really really nifty teas, including a tasty chocolate chai and a truly yummy ginger tea. I now have some twenty flavours sitting in my cupboard, and indeed, the dedicated tea shelf is near to overflowing, so I'm probably near taking a break from my tea buying for a while, at least until my friends help me drink some of what I've already got. In the meantime, once a week or so, I can walk over to my tea cupboard, open it up, and just bask in the sight of lots and lots of nifty, nifty tea.<P> Tea, you see, isn't just a drink. Anyone who sees tea as being a mere beverage is missing out of layers and layers of meaning and metaphor, so many layers that you'd need dual masters degrees in both literature and archaeology to appreciate them. Water is the elixir of life, and coffee is the symbol of modern life, but tea... tea is refinement, culture, civilization, and enlightenment. We don't drink tea to make us work harder; we drink tea to make us relax, to stimulate thought and contemplation. No culture in the world has ever ritualized coffee-brewing, but tea drinking can be formalized, turned into a form of philosophy and religion in and of itself. Tea is an evening drink, something for when the sun is sinking, life is slowing down, and we're appreciating Stuff. Tea is what you drink when you watch the sunset or read a good book, because every good book is made better by a cup of tea. Tea is, in my case at least, a drink more than anything else intimately associated with sitting down with friends and loved ones to play games; I drink tea when I play D&D on Sundays, and I drink tea when I play Civilization IV on Fridays. Tea is happiness.<P> More than that, however, tea is the quest for continual self-improvement and understanding. Tea is what you get when a boring, ugly plant is taken from the group, processed, dried, separated, quality-controlled, sifted, group up, individually bagged, put into a box, put into a bigger box, put into an even BIGGER box, taken out of that box, taken out of the smaller box, taken out of the smallest box, put into a cup, covered in boiling water, and left to steep. Through a thousand steps, an inedible plant is transformed into its tastiest parts, and then through the alchemical addition of hot water, the very best elements of that plant -- the flavour, the aroma, the colour, and the psychoactive compounds -- are draw out. Everything that makes the plant wonderful, which was previusly mixed in with lots of useless cellulose and chlorophyll, is extracted and turned into tasy hot beverage. In this, tea symbolizes the way in which we strive to extract our best elements from our baser and undesirable parts to form a perfect and pure infusion of idealness. And, as an added bonus, it makes for a tasty drink. <P> Normally I would find a way to stretch this out another three hundred words or so, but instead, I'm gonna go make a cup of tea. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="484"></a> <U><B>Ossome</b></u><p> I read a lot of comic books each week. I don't count how many comics I get each week, but based on the space they take up, it's reasonable to assume that each week I get at least twelve or fourteen books, and, of course, I do this weekly. For the most part, though, my reading is pretty restricted. I'm somewhat embarassed to admit how narrow my tastes tend to be; I'd like to imagine that I can enjoy and appreciate a vast array of literature, but the truth is that by and large I pretty much only read books with superheroes, and even then, I have a pretty short list of characters I stick to. I'm not complaining, obviously, and my weekly comics are one of the greatest sources of joy in my life, but from time to time I get the urge to try reading something different from my usual assortment, expanding my horizons and broadening the scope of the ideas and one-liners in my stolen repertoire. This week, I decided that it was long past time for me to try a couple of old series which I'd never really looked at before but which, of everyone I know who has read them, every single one has enjoyed them. The one I'm reading first (because it's a mere fifty issues, and so shouldn't take me more than a month to read) is called Bone, and tells the story of three little bald humanoids and the characters they meet, including a pair who can only be called the Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures. The second series is going to take me quite a lot longer, clocking in as it does at over three hundred issues. The longest running comic ever done by a single reative team, and a Canadian production to boot, Cerebus the Aardvark is a lengthy production which, I'm told, attempts to systematically critique every single aspect of human civilization. Neither of these are superhero books; Bone is a Disney-esque fantasy at times bordering on being a love story, whereas Cerebus was famous for its genre-jumping and, not having yet read so much as the first issue, I'm not qualified to even attempt to say what it actually is. So, I'm out there broadening my horizons, trying new things, and exposing myself to new ideas. I'm still just reading comic books, for better or worse.<P> On a semi-related note, just under one week ago, I went to see the new Iron Man film -- in theatres, no less -- and I was left with a few impressions. First, every M. Night Shyamalan movie strikes me as less appealing than the last, which doesn't say much since only one of his films has ever gotten me interested enough to actually see it. This first observation has nothing to do with anything else and you can now safely forget about it. The other thing that caught my attention was the fact that the music in the movie was absolutely wonderful. I'm sitting and listening to the film's soundtrack as I write this, and I can honestly say that it's rare, nearly unheard of, for me to enjoy this many tracks on a single album unless I burned it myself. The track I like best appears to be the very first, <I>Driving With the Top Down</i>, which for the benefit of those who've seen the film appears to be the music that plays the first time the hero takes his armour for a sucessful test flight, or possibly the music from later on when he flies around a couple of jets. The thing is, I can put my finger pretty easily on why I like so much of the album: to a large degree, it's the same main theme played over and over again at different speeds. Strictly speaking, that's not a very fair review. The CD actually has a number of tracks which are very different from the movie's main theme, including an instrumental version of the opening music from the really old Iron Man cartoon (which pops up a few times in the movie, amusingly). A fair number of the tracks, though -- I've listened to the whole album now and I'd say probably more than three out of evey four -- are really variations of the movie's main dramatic theme. That's not a complaint; I thought the main theme from the movie was incredible and I really enjoy hearing multiple variations on it, allowing me to pick the variation I liked best for my collection. I've commented in the past that my musical tastes are pretty simplistic, however, and this soundtrack in part illustrates it. I really like the album, in large part because the composer comes up with one theme I like and then keeps playing it for me, over and over again. What can I say? Sometimes, I like being pandered to.<P> I could probably extend this line of thought pretty easily to other aspects of life. I don't really have a favourite food, but all the foods that I do enjoy tend to be simple, some might even say bland foods, and they all taste kind of similar. I don't own a huge variety in my clothes, because I buy multiples of what I like. There are certain recurring themes in my miniature collection, and I paint a pretty narrow range of types of figures. Perhaps one of the very few areas of my life where I explore much in the way of variety is this Journal, where I've wandered now and again from my usual spurious-logic essays to humour, fiction, and even poetry from time to time. In that sense, this Journal is actually extremely unusual for me, because it doesn't stick just with my usual established patterns.<P> To some, this way of living might seem boring. Personally, I consider it relaxing. I've always found excitement to be somewhat over-rated and I'm perfectly happy living my life doing mostly the same thing each week (although I do like some difference from day to day). Like the old saying goes, níng wéi tàipíng quÎn, bù zuò luànshì rén (which displays just fine on aericanempire.com but which may or may not display properly if you're reading this on LJ or Facebook. Only one, perhaps two people reading this will know for sure).<p> This is why it's good for me to try a different kind of comic now and again. I'm not the sort of person to radically change my schedule or try experiencing a whole new way of life, but trying a new genre of comic is a safe way for me to try to broaden my horizons, and even my tastes. I don't expose myself to new things as often as I might, and while I don't feel the lack, it's always worthwhile to try something that might be a step on the road to self-improvement. Reading fifty issues of Bone isn't going to vastly change my world view, but it's something different that I can enjoy. Especially if it's got Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="483"></a> <U><B>Beguiled</b></u><p> Webster's Dictionary defines "talisman" as "an object held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune; something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects." The word has a fascinating derivation, believed as it is to come from the Arabic (and the Greek before that) word for "consecration" which is itself evolved from "telein," to initiate into the mysteries. This word is thought to have come from telos, which means, in no uncertain terms, "the end"... the ultimate end, the most remote in space or time, last in a progression or series, the absolute and unquestionable end. The cultural thought processes which must have gone into an evolution like that are truly staggering to contemplate. Still, incredible as that is, Webster leaves out one very important meaning: Talisman is also a very very long boardgame in which you claw yourself up from the depths of nothingness to amass the power to challenge gods, only to be turned into a frog. "Ultimate end" indeed.<P> My brother picked up a copy of the new fourth edition of this twenty-year old boardgame for me in mid May, and a couple of weeks later I finally had the chance to open it up, de-plastic the cards, punch out a couple of cardboard character stand-ups, and in the company of my ever-wonderful girlfriend, play it. It's been a long time since I was the very first person to play a factory-sealed game; I'd forgotten that they come with that "new boardgame" smell that always makes me a little light-headed and kind of nauseous. Whatever sickness I was feeling certainly wasn't due to the game, though... the new version of the board is pretty and shiny, the character stand-ups are welkl-drawn and well-made, and the cards are good quality (albeit far too prone to stick together, making shuffling a challenge). In terms of appearance, on the scale of 1 to nifty, the game is easily right up there. In terms of gameplay, the game's just like I remembered it: very long. Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful game, interesting enough to keep you interested but predictable enough to give you the feeling that you've got a decent shot at winning. That said, we sat down to play the game around 5 and we only wrapped it up around 8:00, and that was with almost no inter-character backstabbing and sabotaging. I cannot imagine playing this game with more than two players, especialyl if any of them are in the least bit competitive. Or, to put it more accurately, I *can* imagine playing it, but I can't imagine playing it to completion, because I can't stay up that long at a stretch. <p> Before today, it had been about two years or more since I'd last played Talisman. That time, there were half a dozen of us crowded around the small table, and half the players qualified as "serious players" by which I mean people who play aggressively and do everything in their power to ensure that nobody else wins. We played for about two hours that day before people began to realise that we were just running in circles around the board, with nobody actually making any progress, and in the end we just put the game away and spent the rest of the night building pillow-forts. Talisman is fun, but you can't go into it assuming you'll finish the game. What the heck, though... that's half the fun. And I have been wanting to have another party where we end up building pillow-forts.<P> In principle, the fourth edition of Talisman isn't that different from its predecessors. The basic gameplay is the same, as players race to accumulate strength and craft and fight their way towards the Crown of Command at the center of the game's concentric rings. The basic characters remain the same; amongst others, you'll still find the dual-wielding Warrior and the alignment-flipping Druid, as well as the ever ineffectual Small Squishy Frog. Conspicuously absent are some of the more unbalanced (and thus, more fun) characters from the previous edition, including one of my personal favourites, the nigh-unstoppable Chaos Warrior, but it's hard to criticize the game's publishers for making it more balanced and fair. Also absent are some of the more horrific monsters, including the Spirit Dragon and the Lich, the mere mention of whom can send long-time Talisman players into post-traumatic flashbacks even years later.<P> One very curious thing happened while playing the new edition game, which is that someone won. Anyone reading this who has actually played Talisman will understand why this came as quite such a shock to me. I attribute it more than anything else to the fact that there weee only two of us playing, so the game went unusually quickly, and we were playing relatively cooperatively, and not attacking each other at every opportunity, reducing each others' scores, stealing their equipment, or doing any of the other bread-and-butter stuff which in some ways is the very essence of Talisman. Over the whole course of the game, I was struck by only one spell and had only one piece of equipment stolen from me, both at non-catastrophic times. Had my lovely opponent really wanted to stop me from getting the Crown of Command, she'd had decent odds of being able to. After three hours, though, I think we'd both come to the point where we were ready for the game to end, and making it take longer was the very last thing on our minds. Of course, every game of Talisman I've ever played reached that point, but what made it unusual was that this happened near the end, rather than less than halfway in.<p> I love Talisman. It's a heck of a game, and I'm thrilled to own a copy. I expect I'll be playing it again before too long, in fact. It's a game that really does have a lot of replay value, because it comes with such a huge variety of characters to pick from, and there are a lot of different ways a player can go about accumulating power and working their way towards the Crown of Command. The game takes a very long time to play, but so do a lot of wonderful games -- Civ IV comes readily to mind -- and as long as you're playing with good people (and maybe have some yummy munchies and tasty tea) it's amazing how the game flies by. There aren't that many boardgames I'd say I really get excited about playing, but (and maybe it's the New Toy Syndrome talking) Talisman is one of them. It is good to have some pillows and blankets on stand-by, of course. <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="482"></a> <U><B>The Six Million Dollar Mini</b></u><p> <blockquote><I> See now, sayeth Forsteri. When most gods of men seek a champion, they seek the pure, and shrive him, and make him worthy. Far wiser is the god who builds servants to be worthy from the start. <p align=right> From </i>The Book of Contrivance<i>, The Book of Brightest Days, chapter 1, verse 10. </blockquote></i><P> In late June of 2005, when the last big D&D game that I ran ended, I switched places with one of the players and he began running his own campaign (which he never named and which I have since begun referring to as <I>The Doom of Shelezar</i> because the characters haven't been taking very good care of their adopted home city). For this campaign, I had the great fun of creating the character of Neyrr Jesond, who I'm pleased to say is still loads of fun to play even now. Come this June, almost exactly one month from today, this game will hit its three year mark, making it the longest single campaign I've ever played (not counting occasional enitre months when we didn't have a single gaming session). Against all odds, Neyrr has become the longest-running character (not counting storyteller characters) I've ever played, and I've loved nearly every minute of it. The character's gone through a lot of changes, but three years (and more than two hundred and fifty hours of gameplay at a conservative estimate) is a long time. To celebrate this anniversary, I'm going to be painting a new miniature to represent Neyrr; the one I have is nearing three years old, not perfectly painted, and no longer looks much like the character because Neyrr's made some changes to his own anatomy. This should be a lot of fun, because I love painting miniatures (since I moved out it's become a special activity I can do with my brother when I visit him), and doubly so when they're actual characters I play. It's also going to be an interesting artistic challenge for me, because rather than buying a sculpted miniature as I normally might, this time I'll be building the miniature entirely from spare parts.<P> When I first set out to find a miniature to represent Neyrr, I faced a considerable challenge. The character is a Koorivar, a race from the Star Wars universe notable for having a big, twisty, leaf-shaped horn rising from the tops of their heads. This being a dreadfully difficult body feature to find on a miniature, I opted simply to find a figure with a big hood coming to a point over the top of his head. This was quite satisfactory, but it's always nagged at me a bit that this was the best I could do. Since then, finding a figure to represent Neyrr has become significantly more difficult. Neyrr started off looking essentially humanoid and human-sized except for the horn; since that time, his left arm and leg have been replaced by the limbs of a troll and he's had angel wings grafted onto his back. Whereas the original figure was swathed in robes appropriate to a wizard, he has since come into posession of a suit of leather armour which are sufficiently signature to him that any figure showing him really ought to be wearing it. Finding wizardly-looking characters wearing armour is tricky under the best of circumstances, because most miniature companies tend to stick fairly solidly with the good old fantasy standbys. Even if I did find a figure with the right body and clothes, I would almost certainly never find one with the different set of limbs, and even if I did manage all that, it's a safe bet that the figure wouldn't have angel wings. Finally, while I personally know one one or two pewter miniatures that can be bought that look close enough to all that to be servicable, they're all of characters with weapons in their hands, which isn't suitable for Neyrr. To paraphrase Miles Coverdale (or possibly Charles Spurgeon... or maybe Gailard Sartain...), if you want a miniature sculpted right, sometimes you have to sculpt it yourself.<P> Of course, I couldn't sculpt a decent figure if my life depended on it, which is where the miracle of Warhammer bits comes in.<P> One of my favourite things about Games Workshop -- the company which produces the Warhammer and Warhammer 40K toy lines -- is that their models are built to be convertible. The majority of their figures are plastic, for ease of cutting, bending, and glueing, and on top of that, most of their figures are sold modularly, so that as you build, say Elven archer number four hundred and sixty two, you can use entirely different-looking arms, legs, torso, and head from Elven archers numbers four hundred and sixty one and four hundred and sixty. You use up a lot of glue building a warhammer army, but it's worth it to have a huge amount of control over how a character is dressed and posed. Sitting here in my display case, I've got a full Necron army of over one hundred figures, and no two look identical. The same logic makes such figures extremely useful to me right now. This past week, I went onto eBay and began browsing bitz (a common fan name for bits of Games Workshop figures), trying to find 1) the most suitable-looking pieces for 2) the lowest price and where possible 3) being sold by the same person so as to minimize the cost of shipping and handling. eBay is a treasure trove of bitz; because the game encourages people to build new and customized models out of different spare parts, numerous shops online sell bitz on their own at low prices, allowing the careful shopper to get just the right arm and not have to buy an entire boxed set of eighteen elves to get one piece.<P> I've got the time and the motivation to do this project right, so for stage one, I'm building only abotu half of Neyrr's body -- the right arm, torso, and head. These are the most important parts, because these are the parts that really need to look like the character for the model to work, especially the head. For the head, I chose a Wood Elves Glade Guard; this head is a simple humanoid face in a big, billowy hood, so that I can either add a horn to the top -- the plastic is soft enough to cut or drill -- or else do the same as I did with the first model and say it's covered. The torso and arm are much easier, as all I needed was to find something I thought looked sufficiently well-dressed, opting for bits of High Elf archer because they'll be the same basic size as a Wood Elf head, making for easy combining. The end result will be an unarmed upper body with a basically human appearance, wearing tastefully understated leather armour with a few simple jewel decorations, quite appropriately. As yet, I haven't bought the more monsterous left limbs, because these will be a bit trickier, since while they need to look very different from the rest of the body, I want them to look similar to each other, which means that I probably won't be able to go with Warhammer pieces. Instead, the plan is to scavenge my old Heroclix -- plastic figures of comic book superheroes which are easily cut up for bits of approximately the same scale as Warhammer figures, and if the left limbs look mishapenly large compared to the rest of the body, so much the better. The really tricky part will be the mundane right leg. Most games Workshop legs are a single unit of two legs, which one then glues a torso onto, so I'll need to find a set of legs which 1) looks similar to the torso armour, 2) can have the left leg removed without destroying what it looks like, and 3) can then have a new leg glued on without looking too terrible. Legs will no doubt be the hardest part of this figure, but if that ends up being the case, then it means I was able to craft the rest of him without too much trouble. Adding wings will be pretty easy at the end... angel wings are cheaply available from a dozen miniature companies, and it'll be easy enough to drill a couple of small holes into Neyrr's back to make it look like the wings are protruding.<P> Final projected price of this cusom miniature: three to four dollars more than I would have paid had I bought an intact, ready to paint metal figure from one of my usual companies. That said, the extra money I'm paying includes the fact that in addition to the one head I wanted, I'm getting another twenty-one that I like but don't have an immediate use for, which I'm quite sure will eventually get used to create other figures. Similarly, I'm getting the one specific torso I wanted, plus another seven, at least five of which I like enough to use for other figures, and an extra nine right arms. Heck, if I want, I can use these extra bits, along with other bits left over from previous modeling projects, to build multiple versions of Neyrr... one of his actual mutated form, another of the more human-looking illusion with which he habitually cloaks himself, and even one or two others if the whim strikes me.<P> Now I just have to make sure that the game doesn't end in the next month. That would be really annoying... <P> <I>If you've found this entry interesting, <a href="mailto:ericlis@hotmail.com">mail Eric</a> about it. <BR> If you didn't find this entry interesting, go to hell.</i> <HR> <a name="481"></a> <U><B>The View From The Cheap Seats</b></u><p> In any game where we construct societies, it's easy to forget the little people who make up those societies who the games don't take into account. Take my current ongoing obsession with Civilization 4, which I continue to play with friends at weekly gaming marathons, including four hours just yesterday. The country I'm currently building has existed for over four thousand years, dominates about one sixth of the world's surface, and is about to wipe another nation off the face of the Earth via a combination of indomitable military might and highly advanced culture and enlightenment. The nations holds more than a million people, split between five great cities. Does the game reflect the lives of each of those million people? Not only does it not reflect the trials and tribulations of daily life, since each turn is separated by a quarter of a century, a significant number of people are born and die without me even checking on the status of their farms during their lifetime. From my perspective, as the person who manages production and growth in the cities, the largest cities in the world each have a total of fifteen citizens or less who actions I can control... where the remaining 999960 citizens live is never addressed by the game. One way or another, there people have dreams, hopes, and aspirations. They work, build, farm, and accomplish. To put it bluntly, they have lives. And now, selected excerpts from the life and times of the citizens of Fnordia.<P> <I>The young city of Fnordstadt, just off the vast and largely empty town square, near the intersection of First Avenue and Kallisti. Binky, a young cooper, walks down the street, as he has every day for decades, not paying attention.</i><BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "What the h- OW!"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "What? What is it?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I think I broke my nose. Ow!"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "How did you do that?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I was walking down the street to work, and I walked into this building."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "What the temple?" How did you walk into the temple? It's huge!"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I don't know. I wasn't looking. There wasn't a bloody great temple here yesterday."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I know. They just finished it. They've been working on it for about two hundred years."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "You mean these things just appear when they finish?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Pretty much. You think this is bad, just wait until they finish building the plumbing system."<P> <I>Fnordopolis! Cultural capital of the empire, Fnordopolis is home to some of Fnordia's most enduring and impressive sights, some of its greatest thinkers. Pooky and Squeaky meet at the corner coffee shop, as they have every day since Pooky arrived in Fnordopolis.</i><BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Namo Buddha, barkeep." <BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Namo Buddha, Pooky."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Namo Buddha, Bouncy."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Namo Buddha, Pooky."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Namo Buddha, Squeaky."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Shalom aleichem, Pooky."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Huh?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I said, 'Shalom aleichem.' It means hello."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "What are you talking about? Why are you using those funny words?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "They aren't funny words. They're Hebrew."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Hebrew? What's that?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "It's my new language. I converted to Judaism this morning."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Converted to who now?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Judaism. They just invented it in one of the other empires, and I thought it sounded fun, so I converted."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Why? What's wrong with Buddhism?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Oh, nothing's wrong with Buddhism, but I think the city will benefit from a greater variety of religions. They're going to build a synagogue here, too."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "What's a synagogue?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "You know, I'm not actually sure, but the missionary assured me that it makes people happy, so I suspect it's alcoholic."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "This is too much. I can barely keep track of one religion, let alone too. I hope there aren't any more out there. Hey, there's Mooshy. Morning, Mooshy!"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Pooky, Squeaky! Namastay."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Huh?"<P> <I>The world is vast, and the empires are small. Much land remains in between the great cities, dark, unexplored, unexploited. Farmy, a humble Worker, has been a citizen of FNordia for over a millenium. With his hands, a dozen farms have been built. His feet have been the first to walk miles of road linking different cities together. By his knife, no less than six forests have fallen and been used to build hammers. As he walks along the Great Mountain Road, plodding towards Fnord Beach's underdeveloped countryside, he passes his friend and fellow Worker, Miney, busily working on a new stretch of road heading off to the North, towards Fnordheim.</i><BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Happy work to you."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "And happy work to you, my friend. Why are you building a road here?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "The city's governor wants a mine built over on Fnord Hill. I'm building a road on my way while I head over there."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Fnord Hill? You can't but a mine on Fnord Hill. There's jungle growing there?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "So what?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "So, we can't cut down jungle. Our knives aren't sharp enough."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "You're not still using a bronze knife, are you?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Of course I am. What else is there, clay?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "No, iron. Iron can cut down jungle trees. How haven't you heard about this? I've been using iron blades for eighty years."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Iron, huh? I knew that they were researching the stuff, but I didn't know we'd discovered it. How does it work?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "A lot like bronze. You sharpen it, then you cut things with it."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Sounds complicated."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I know, but you get used to it."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Is it safe?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Well, basically yes. I mean, it is still a sharp piece of metal."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "What about the health implications? The long term effects of exposure? Has it been tested?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "What do you mean, tested? It's a piece of metal."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "No, it's two metals, mixed together. That's barely better than witchcraft! Who knows what combining two different metals might do?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "It's perfectly safe! It's just a knife."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Tell that to Goopy."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Goopy? Isn't he one of the Scientists?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Yeah, he was assigned to the project to see what happens when you combine potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "So what?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "He would tell you we need more safety testing, let's leave it at that"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Fine. You keep working with your knife, I'll use mine. When will you decide it's safe enough for you?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I'm just waiting for the short term safety data... one, maybe two hundred more years. By then I'll have finished the farms around Fnord Beach and we'll see if you've developed any weird diseases."<P> <I>Within the empires, there is peace, but between rival empires, peace is a commodity which must be worked for, and all too often can't be found. When there is no more room to expand within a nation's borders, that nation must look past their own coloured land and into the lands bearing someone else's colour. At the Western border of Fnordia, the citizens of Fnordburg gather at the walls to watch as an invadinf army prepares to charge, and they send good wishes to the soldiers who guard them.</i><BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "It's a sobering sight out there."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Sure is. They've assembled the biggest army I've ever seen out there. Gotta be two, maybe three people out there."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "We've only got three soldiers to defend us. I'm worried."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I think we'll be okay. We've got the walls to help us, and our swordsmen should be able to fight off those warriors."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Still..."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Yeah. Still. "<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Here they come. Look out, Swordy!"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Well. That was kind of anticlimactic."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "I don't know. I like the way Swordy disintegrated him. I didn't know you could do that with a sword."<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp "Want to watch the other two soldiers vanish trying to attack our walls?"<BR> &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&