Dynamic Subspace

Category: Fantasy

  • Happy Halloween!

    cloaked skeletal figure with a pumpkin for a head, standing in a graveyard, full moon in the sky
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    I hope that you have a ghoulish time today!

  • Hurricane Helene

    a paved two lane road extending to the horizon at dusk, the sun illuminates the clouds above in a variety of colors

    Before Hurricane Helene was forecast, I had arranged to travel to Georgia to help my parents for two weeks after my dad got out of the hospital. By the time that I got off the Silver Meteor Amtrak train in Jesup, Hurricane Helene was just about to make landfall. Considering how well constructed our family homestead is combined with its 60kwh whole-house generator, we thought that we were well prepared for the storm. Of course, Helene’s global-warming-intensified onslaught exceeded expectations all along its path. We worked with neighbors to clear fallen oak trees from the dirt roads leading to our neck of the woods. Our generator kept us with power for the first two days of the power outage, but then, a woefully underclassed plastic tensioner pulley broke into two leaving the generator without its fan to pull air through its massive radiator and promptly shut down in the dead of night. My dad and I pulled it apart but without a replacement part, we were unable to get it going again. We went without power for three days. The food in the refrigerator spoiled and we would sit in the cars in shifts to keep cool. Cell phone service–Verizon and Google Fi–was completely down and then slowly restored in fits-and-starts. It goes without saying that I wasn’t able to write on my blog, but I did use the time to read Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic (1983). A repair crew went through our property’s power line easement around 9pm on the third day and our power was restored. The generator repair company replaced the tensioner pulley two days later (more on this later). As I’m writing this, there are still thousands of folks in the Satilla ERMC service area without power. Crews are working non-stop to clear the lines and restore power. There are, of course, many more along the 500 mile stretch of devastation in much worse shape than us.

  • Reexamining “The Wolves in the Walls”

    Program book and ticket for "The Wolves in the Walls" stage adaptation of the book by Neil Gaiman and DAve McKean. Messy desk in the background.

    Recently, I ran across the image above of the program book and ticket of the stage adaptation of “The Wolves in the Walls,” based on the book of the same title by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean on my desk in Liverpool. It gave me pause.

    I wrote the short summary below , after seeing it in the fall of 2006:

    It’s about a girl named Lucy, who likes to draw. She lives with her mum who makes jam, her dad who plays the tuba, and her brother who plays video games. One day, Lucy begins to hear wolves in the walls. At first, her family doesn’t believe her, but then the wolves come out and it’s all over! Pandemonium breaks loose and Lucy must brave the wolves to regain her pig puppet from the clutches of the crazy wolves.

    The recent allegations against Gaiman made me think of the theatrical adaptation and source material in a completely skewed and disorienting way. Its difficult now to square my before and after interpretations.

    It’s challenging to ignore what shouldn’t, according to Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” (1967), matter as far as how we interpret the text. We, the readers, shouldn’t give an author tyranny over our interpretation of a text. Yet, Gaiman is an author who has cultivated a public persona that dovetails with the positive interpretations of his creative work and associated social causes. Joss Whedon also comes to mind in terms of the close connection between auteur, themes, and social causes, and what happens when the auteur’s behavior conflicts with the constructed persona. Of course, these public personae are created, cultivated, supported, and accepted, but the person beneath the persona is far more complicated and potentially far different than the persona circulating in culture. The author’s behavior might be reprehensible and seem radically different from what the audience has come to expect from the author’s persona. A problem for the reader and critic is to disentangle the linkages between the work, persona, and person in order to provide richer interpretations as opposed to those dominated by the author, persona, or both. Of course, what Gaiman has been alleged to have done must be addressed and remedied in other ways.

  • Flying Around Azeroth for Research

    Debian 12 Bookworm desktop that looks like BeOS. World of Warcraft is in the foreground over a number of icons. Oracle VirtualBox is hosting Windows 7 Professional 32-bit, which is running SingleCore Vanilla.

    My current access to Azeroth is kind of convoluted. It’s a little bit like an incantation or prayer that my Undead priest Mordvar might have to speak in order to heal a comrade or hurt a foe.

    I’m running World of Warcraft 1.12 via Wine in the foreground window where you see Mordvar flying a Tawny Wind Rider on a flight path. In the background on the right, I have Windows 7 Professional 32-bit (a copy that I received for free from a Microsoft event in Ohio some years back) running in Oracle VirtualBox. And in Windows 7, I have an old copy of SingleCore Vanilla, a WoW server emulator that I connect to on my local machine.

    This weird assemblage allows me to explore Azeroth for research using admin tools that are otherwise unavailable to normal WoW players.

  • LEGO Mashup MOC of Gandalf 30213 and Fierce Flyer 31004

    Back in 2013, I built a small LEGO MOC scene depicting Gandolf (from The Hobbit 30213 polybag set) riding on one of the great eagles (LEGO Creator Fierce Flyer 31004). The scene shows a miniature river flanked by mountainsides. I used one of the mountains to anchor a Technic support that buoyed the eagle carrying Gandolf on an important Middle Earth mission. Positioned correctly, the support isn’t seen and the eagle appears to be in midflight.