(no subject)

[camwyn]

I just finished reading Snow Crash.

I'm suddenly rather glad that I can't code for beans. Safer that way.

I'm also vaguely creeped out by a few things: the surfacing of a line from my women's Torah commentary about how for four hundred of the six hundred* years that Solomon's Temple stood in Jerusalem, there were Asherah statues in the sanctuary- well, that's the big one. Followed closely by:

"Now, are we actually gonna go before a federal judge, and tell him that some moldy Babylonian God is going to drop in on Central Park West, and start tearing up the city?"
"Sumerian, not Babylonian...."
Evo Shandor just got a lot more scary.

No more than that. No spoilers. Well, okay, one thing: glass knives? This is the big surprise no one can detect? This lies at the core of Raven's badassery and people consider it a surprise? Dude. I'm really sorry, but the instant the first scan of Raven said they weren't seeing any weapons on him, what went through my head was: "no one here is a cook, obviously." Because, see, Kyocera? The nice folks who make laser printers? They also make scary-ass ceramic knives. Not like they have monomolecular edges or anything, but seriously, they're scary and nasty and have a Mohs rating of about 8.2. Average glass has a Mohs rating of around 6. I guess it's easier to make the glass knives, but if I were looking for an edged weapon that wasn't gonna turn up on scan I'd be running straight to Japan to buy me some knives that wouldn't shatter if they dropped and never needed sharpening, not ever. And that I could use on my food if the whole cutting-people-really-deep part didn't come up..

Having said that, I've got work to do. More later.

*I may be remembering the numbers wrong, as I have not been able to pick up said commentary or a Tanakh since the idea occurred to me, but that's the best I can do.

Comments

[camwyn]

Oh, Crowmark was boatloads of fun. She was, more or less, the tribe's focal point for Pratchettonian inspiration particles. She had a lot of trouble immersing herself in the Wolfrider Way, which is rather like Taoism when it comes right down to it. She kept wanting to fiddle with stuff and poke at stuff instead of just letting it be. Seeing what fire did to sand left her wondering what fire did to clay, and got her a few interesting trips to the healer, since she never really did figure out why clay sometimes exploded in fire and sometimes didn't. She got permission from her tribe's chief to dig herself a pit for her fire experiments, so that she didn't set the forest on fire, and she spent quite a lot of her leisure time in there. Took a lot of teasing from her tribemates, who joked that she must surely have had troll blood, the way she carried on. They put up with it, though, mostly because the glass knives made deboning easy when troll knives weren't available and because she was able to use the glass spear quite effectively to catch and kill large fish.

She wound up discovering a number of things, but I had to justify them to the tribe admin every step of the way. I don't think she ever really let go of the idea that rocks could melt- she once encountered an elf who'd been so far underground that he saw a magma flow, and the thought of MELTING ROCK left her wanting to create a supremely hot fire and throw things into it to see what she could get. Alas, she never did get to pursue that very far.