The death of the laptop means I can no longer access the Amazon codes for books on the promo post. I’m hoping to get that fixed sometime this week and will then run the promo.
Sorry. Meanwhile here are two images to play with:
I Give Up
31 thoughts on “I Give Up”
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According To Hoyt 
First image, “Wonder if that guy is coming to visit”.
Second image, “Humm, looks like you need some help”. (IE The Sea Dragon isn’t the being who damaged the ship.)
Raises a glass of bourbon in the general direction of the laptop! Here’s to Moscow Rule #9.
Meanwhile Mrs Hoyt, you could go ahead and make said promo post whenever is convenient AND add “Links to purchase in the comments”
$20 says the huns and hoydens would have ’em all up by the 5th comment.
second image:
(yeah, not really about dragons)
Sigh. I will down a shot of Kraken in memorium of your former laptop.
Laptop computer that is. Any resemblance to any other tops of laps is inadvertent and unintended. I plead the fifth.
~
The Fifth, or a fifth? Although some days, doing both might not be a bad idea.
sadly even that’s been mucked up as they only sell in 750 metrical thingies
..which are derived from the fifth. It’s as close as a simple metric volume can get. It is off, but by only about 2 thousandths. Granted, in the wrong direction.
Second image: “Kraken, dammit! I asked you to raise a KRAKEN!”
“Uh, I think he ATE the Kraken!”
And that’s why only the bravest were willing to sail the depths of the Kraken Sea.
The great peril of the Serpent Sea: the sea serpents wants you to stop and chat just as the ship catches on fire.
It’s not for nothing that our sea serpent took up residence in the minion pool. (Remember that she and Fluffy only met after that.)
First one: Okay, that’s the last time I do LSD while interviewing a time traveller!
First one:
Hacking digital wallpaper was supposed to be easy. Your biggest challenge was getting the passwords, and that was usually a matter of social engineering as much as computer skills. Find out who had set it, and what they were likely to use.
As it turned out, I could do it easier by sending a lost password request to Housing’s computers. They didn’t even bother to check whether I should be an authorized user. I was registered to the apartment, so they gave me the password without question.
And then something would have to go wrong when I tried to change it. I’d wanted the walls, tiny as they might be, to look more like a typical bedroom back home on Earth. But I apparently missed a keystroke somewhere in that sequence of commands, and the next thing I knew, I was looking at something straight out of a cyberpunk video game. And when I tried to go back and fix it, what do you know but it got so stuck it wouldn’t respond to any commands.
Normal procedure would be to call down to Housing’s IT people and ask them to look at the inner workings of their system. But there was no way I could fake sounding like my parents to a real live human being on the phone. Which meant I was stuck with this crazy stuff until I could figure out how to hack around it.
(Yes, it’s from the same world as my effort from July 26.)
Second image: When asking for directions from a Sea Dragon, it is vitally important to be polite…
The immersion windows were supposed to help Earthers like her parents deal with being underground all the time, but Kelley had been born in Luna Colony, and walls did not bother her. Walls meant no rad limits or alarms, they meant the air was less likely to get out, and once new tunnels had been fitted out as hab space, the walls and the surrounding vacuum space between the hab and the rock made fairly good insulation, so walls meant warmth. Going up top, out in the vac, meant procedures and danger and alertness and either sauna hot or really cold. Walls meant she could relax.
So Kelly used her immersion window to explore fiction. The systems could synthesize immersive 3d viewpoints from just about anything in the library, so she’d been cycling through views from everything since she was little – back then it had been Powerpuff Girls and Smurfs, and lately she’d been cycling through viewpoints from the Bible, to Wuthering Heights, to Star Trek, and now to something a classmate had sent her from that 2d movie Blade Runner.
But nothing stayed long. She felt like she was looking for something.
“Kelley – dinner!” called her Mom.
Second image:
“Why yes, we do have some breath mints and would be happy to give you a barrel of them.”
~
LOL
Top pic looks like something out of the new Cyberpunk game – something in the nicer parts of Night City, that is.
The second image reminds me of <Voyage of the Dawn Treader, even if the sea serpent in this picture is much bigger.
(second picture)
Sakar felt the brief but intense pulse of elemental energy, somewhere from far above. It took her a few moments, as she turned about and “flew” through the water toward the surface, to feel what that had been — someone or something drawing from the elemental plane of Fire, out into a manifestation of Air.
Very well, nothing much to set afire up there in the sky. But then it came once again, both closer to her and closer to the Water above, and she recognized it as the signature of a firebird. Not very intelligent, even less ethical, seldom much pleasant or comfortable to be around.
The Water around her in the Dawn Sea was cool and immutable, and she set her anchoring in it as she felt for the swooping little dot she knew would still be up there, around the rapidly-nearing border between Air and Water. And when she felt its link to Fire start to quicken… she quenched it with her own affinity to the Water. Like a sharp but careful slap to a naughty child.
But it deeply surprised her, when she broke the surface to see if it would be coming back around for further chastisement, to find an odd-looking object floating on the sea; apparently made of wood (of all things), and evidently by the strange, small creatures inside and on and above it. Which “felt” to her inner senses like none she had ever known. And their wooden — thing — had little or no perceptible affinity to any of the elements at all.
There were two small fires, one in the cloth “wings” above it, and one on the surface of the wooden object itself. There was a scent of fear about those, in the creatures, and a lingering trace of elemental Fire in the flames there too.
Sakar realized she could easily squirt a tiny stream of seawater at the fires and extinguish them, yet the little creatures might take that amiss. Perhaps she could simply but carefully touch the firebird’s droppings with her own affinity to Water, and then set about trying to communicate..?
(first image)
(And yes, this one is even longer; but maybe I needed to write something like this, and Sarah’s story-pictures are as outrageously inspirational as ever.)
Aliette listened to the last jaunty, dramatic strains of post-“movie” music wind to their final movement’s conclusion. She’d still not been here long enough for the novelty of such things to fade for her, in one of the few “high tech” (but also regrettably “low magic”) corners of the Skein of Variations — yet as soon as it was over, this subtle but gory little machine-cinema inexplicably called (of all things) “Blade Runner” (for reasons never properly explained), she was once again, as so often… bored to languor. So she shut off the device, rather than go pick another of their dozen or so iridescent little cinema-disks.
She knew full well she was homesick for the (to her very different) world of her birth, most specifically for her own (only rarely ironically titled) Empire Gentil, and for the British Imperial Commonwealth, and the Providential States of America, and the Persian Federation, and… especially, for a place where she could speak proper French to people and actually have them speak back. And she knew why she and her mother and her aunt were here, not there, and why such an odd (if not obscure) Variation of the World was their joint hiding-hole.
Among more billions of people than she had fingers on either hand.
For now. Until something changed, enough changed. Somehow. At last.
She went to the large windows — at least this apartment had that — and pulled back their curtains and looked out. First on a couple dozen feet (odd how this world’s France had invented something called a “metric system” in place of the pouce, and the pied, and the toise, and all the familiar rest) of empty air moving in the soft breeze, then on… a monotonous stretch of reddish brick, broken only by an equally-predictable array of slickly-glassed windows.
And something in Aliette de Bouchard moved, softly but deeply and strongly. It wasn’t right to sit here, day after day, night after night, and just… starve her soul. Let her magic, well, rust and rot. Mostly and far too much.
It wasn’t even forbidden, really, and neither her aunt nor her mother would be home before night (this day, as so many other days). And she would be able to continue her experiment with the Reich accumulator; though “orgone” wasn’t supposed to be quite what she knew magic to be, the things did work.
She picked up the little bottle carefully, from out of its setting among various receiving and focusing elements — that could, after all, magnify even this odd world’s relative trickle into a decent stock of essence. Held it up to her face, felt the invisible glow of moonlight energy inside, pulled the cork, and inhaled.
There was no smell, of course, but it felt like the very perfume of Heaven.
And as it flowed on her in-breath, into her very breath, she knew.
A dimensional affinity spell, selecting free with constraints over all of the less defined and stable “worlds” in the envelope of the threads of the Skein. Not to go there, of course, simply to look and not touch (or be touched by). Holding the metal frames of the windows as she opened them wide, she felt through all the images of that cinema-drama for the most dazzling and hopeful…
And as she opened her eyes again, she saw wonders even more than this odd world she visited, but did not inhabit. “High tech” indeed; city lights and vistas far more vital than a hundred-foot square of dull brick and slick glass.
She climbed up into the wide window’s ample embrasure, secure in knowing her spell would keep her inside even over a sixty-foot drop, even turn a rifle bullet if one had somehow been shot at her. And made herself comfortable.
And as she did, there slowly seeped into Aliette a comfort she’d not known for many months now. Not a “Citizen of the Galaxy” (as that clever book had had it), not nearly so much as that… but a wanderer in the worlds, at last, again.
Interesting.
Your computer died.
My computer fried Friday night.
That’s only two data points though. We’d need at least one more out of this group to call it a trend.
If I were a real suspicious person, and we did have someone else with a suddenly crashed system, I’d say we, as a group, were being cyber attacked by elements of the Prog-Socs.
AOL and G00ble’s Gee-mail were both kludged up last night (Sunday night). Not sure if coincidence, or Murphy’s Law of Electronic Communications.
I had to re-burn my Pi boot loader Saturday. Didn’t loose anything though.
Whew! The email tag headline gave me a start but the actual meaning was not as dire. I recently had to replace my laptop after it failed on a day I needed to work remote. Arrrg. Let’s just say that taking cash value vacation when I am about to retire cost me a lot more than the replacement I had to buy.
Stories for the pictures:
Jaime paused to take a break from welding the reinforcements to her windows. The night air was cool, and the sounds from the streets below, muted. The neon signs shown and strobed like a perpetual Christmas tree display. She could smell the exhaust from the transport that had just left from the platform across the way. And she watched the platform supervisor as he watched the transport enter the traffic lane.
“Sorry about the fires. But you’re carrying such a large load of spices that I just had to sneeze. By the way, you might want to help that poor fellow who fell off the back. If he can’t swim, I might have to charge you for a water rescue.”
Twenty five social credits! Only a deplorable would be out without a mask in 2070. Glad I called in the drone strike.
(first picture — and not first try)
Aliette listened to the last jaunty, dramatic strains of post-“movie” music wind to their final movement’s conclusion. She’d still not been here long enough for the novelty of such things to fade for her, in one of the few “high tech” (but also regrettably “low magic”) corners of the Skein of Variations — yet as soon as it was over, this subtle but gory little machine-cinema called (of all things) “Blade Runner” (for reasons never properly explained), she was once again, as so often… bored to languor. So she shut off the device, rather than go pick another of their dozen or so iridescent little cinema-disks.
She knew full well she was homesick for the (to her very different) world of her birth, most specifically for her own (only rarely ironically titled) Empire Gentil, and for the British Imperial Commonwealth, and the Providential States of America, and the Persian Federation, and… especially, for a place where she could speak proper French to people and actually have them speak back. And she knew why she and her mother and her aunt were here, not there, and why such an odd (if not obscure) Variation of the World was their joint hiding-hole.
Among more billions of people than she had fingers on either hand.
For now. Until something changed, enough changed. Somehow. At last.
She went to the large windows — at least this apartment had that — and pulled back their curtains and looked out. First on a couple dozen feet (odd how this world’s France had invented something called a “metric system” in place of the pouce, and the pied, and the toise, and all the familiar rest) of empty air moving in the soft breeze, then on… a monotonous stretch of reddish brick, broken only by an equally-predictable array of slickly-glassed windows.
And something in Aliette de Bouchard moved, softly but deeply and strongly. It wasn’t right to sit here, day after day, night after night, and just… starve her soul. Let her magic, well, rust and rot. Mostly and far too much.
It wasn’t even forbidden, really, and neither her aunt nor her mother would be home before night (this day, as so many other days). And she would be able to continue her experiment with the Reich accumulator; though “orgone” wasn’t supposed to be quite what she knew magic to be, the things did work.
She picked up the little bottle carefully, from out of its setting among various receiving and focusing elements — that could, after all, magnify even this odd world’s relative trickle into a decent stock of essence. Held it up to her face, felt the invisible glow of moonlight energy inside, pulled the cork, and inhaled.
There was no smell, of course, but it felt like the very perfume of Heaven.
And as it flowed on her in-breath, into her very breath, she knew.
A dimensional affinity spell, selecting free with constraints over all of the less defined and stable “worlds” in the envelope of the threads of the Skein. Not to go there, of course, simply to look and not touch (or be touched by). Holding the metal frames of the windows as she opened them wide, she felt through all the images of that cinema-drama for the most dazzling and hopeful…
And as she opened her eyes again, she saw wonders even more than this odd world she visited, but did not inhabit. “High tech” indeed; city lights and vistas far more vital than a hundred-foot square of dull brick and slick glass.
She climbed up into the wide window’s ample embrasure, secure in knowing her spell would keep her inside even over a sixty-foot drop, even turn a rifle bullet if one had somehow been shot at her. And made herself comfortable.
And as she did, there slowly seeped into Aliette a comfort she’d not known for many months now. Not a “Citizen of the Galaxy” (as that clever book had had it), not nearly so much as that… but a wanderer in the worlds, at last, again.
(first picture)
(and second part of vignette as written, Willie Pete is being censorious again and I’m playing divide-and-conquer)
She went to the large windows — at least this apartment had that — and pulled back their curtains and looked out. First on a couple dozen feet (odd how this world’s France had invented something called a “metric system” in place of the pouce, and the pied, and the toise, and all the familiar rest) of empty air moving in the soft breeze, then on… a monotonous stretch of reddish brick, broken only by an equally-predictable array of slickly-glassed windows.
And something in Aliette de Bouchard moved, softly but deeply and strongly. It wasn’t right to sit here, day after day, night after night, and just… starve her soul. Let her magic, well, rust and rot. Mostly and far too much.
It wasn’t even forbidden, really, and neither her aunt nor her mother would be home before night (this day, as so many other days). And she would be able to continue her experiment with the Reich accumulator; though “orgone” wasn’t supposed to be quite what she knew magic to be, the things did work.
She picked up the little bottle carefully, from out of its setting among various receiving and focusing elements — that could, after all, magnify even this odd world’s relative trickle into a decent stock of essence. Held it up to her face, felt the invisible glow of moonlight energy inside, pulled the cork, and inhaled.
There was no smell, of course, but it felt like the very perfume of Heaven.
And as it flowed on her in-breath, into her breath, she knew.
A dimensional affinity spell, selecting free with constraints over all of the less defined and stable “worlds” in the envelope of the threads of the Skein. Not to go there, of course, simply to look and not touch (or be touched by). Holding the metal frames of the windows as she opened them wide, she felt through all the images of that cinema-drama for the most dazzling and hopeful…
And as she opened her eyes again, she saw wonders even more than this odd world she visited, but did not inhabit. “High tech” indeed; city lights and vistas far more vital than a hundred-foot square of dull brick and slick glass.
She climbed up into the wide window’s ample embrasure, secure in knowing her spell would keep her inside even over a sixty-foot drop, even turn a rifle bullet if one had somehow been shot at her. And made herself comfortable.
And as she did, there slowly seeped into Aliette a comfort she’d not known for many months now. Not a “Citizen of the Galaxy” (as that clever book had had it), not nearly so much as that… but a wanderer in the worlds, at last, again.
(first picture)
(and second part of vignette, WP is being DE again)
She went to the large windows — at least this apartment had that — and pulled back their curtains and looked out. First on a couple dozen feet (odd how this world’s France had invented something called a “metric system” in place of the pouce, and the pied, and the toise, and all the familiar rest) of empty air moving in the soft breeze, then on… a monotonous stretch of reddish brick, broken only by an equally-predictable array of slickly-glassed windows.
It wasn’t even forbidden, really, and neither her aunt nor her mother would be home before night (this day, as so many other days). And she would be able to continue her experiment with the Reich accumulator; though “orgone” wasn’t supposed to be quite what she knew magic to be, the things did work.
She picked up the little bottle carefully, from out of its setting among various receiving and focusing elements — that could, after all, magnify even this odd world’s relative trickle into a decent stock of essence. Held it up to her face, felt the invisible glow of moonlight energy inside, pulled the cork, and inhaled.
There was no smell, of course, but it felt like the very perfume of Heaven.
And as it flowed on her in-breath, into her breath, she knew.
A dimensional affinity spell, selecting free with constraints over all of the less defined and stable “worlds” in the envelope of the threads of the Skein. Not to go there, of course, simply to look and not touch (or be touched by). Holding the metal frames of the windows as she opened them wide, she felt through all the images of that cinema-drama for the most dazzling and hopeful…
And as she opened her eyes again, she saw wonders even more than this odd world she visited, but did not inhabit. “High tech” indeed; city lights and vistas far more vital than a hundred-foot square of dull brick and slick glass.
She climbed up into the wide window’s ample embrasure, secure in knowing her spell would keep her inside even over a sixty-foot drop, even turn a rifle bullet if one had somehow been shot at her. And made herself comfortable.
And as she did, there slowly seeped into Aliette a comfort she’d not known for many months now. Not a “Citizen of the Galaxy” (as that clever book had had it), not nearly so much as that… but a wanderer in the worlds, at last, again.
Also wrote a vignette for the first picture — the person there is from an alternate history hiding out in a strange “low magic, high tech” timeline (ours) and decides to “look in” on whatever other-Earth timeline best-matches “Blade Runner” (yes, in that “Skein” that keeps on showing up), since her window faces “two dozen feet of empty air” and then more apartments. But…
Word Suppressor engaged Royal Snit Mode (POSTING… is followed by a quiet re-load of the page with no new content), and several attempts using bits and pieces of the story don’t post either. (The same way other vignettes have gone down the Willie Pete Memory Hole, like the one based on Leigh Kimmel’s idea of “a mini Ringworld with old battle damage” and an 1870s[?] one with lots of interstellar colonies that Earth doesn’t know about. And of course “it’s not just me” by a very long shot.)
Obviously I still have all the story text (I’m not that stupid), and of course the practice value of such things is immense, but it looks like the only way this or those other “orphan” vignettes will ever see the light of day is on my own (now notional) Web site. Thanks again, Sarah, for the outrageously inspirational pictures…