August 11, 2014
They called themselves the Corporeal Twins, for they were the last of their kind who had not ascended to the realm of pure physical or pure spiritual energy. And what they told me would echo down through the rest of my years:
“The world is not of a single scale, but infinitely nested, infinitely fractal. There are stories, hardships, and magic at every scale in the cosmos. Do not mistake scale for importance, and know that a difference can be made at any level.”
August 10, 2014
(plural nerkles)
(Brit) enPR: nûkl, IPA: /nɜːkl/
(US) enPR: nûrkl, IPA: /nɝːkl/
1. A person who is intellectual but generally introverted but who lacks mathematical ability or dislikes mathematics (informal, sometimes derogatory).
A lot of my friends like Dungeons and Dragons but I’m too much of a nerkle to get the hang of all the numbers.
2. One who has an intense, obsessive interest in something stereotypically nerdy (cf. nerd) but is handicapped by their inability or unwillingness to engage in mathematics (slang, always derogatory).
We don’t want Steven on our Math Bowl team because he’s a nerkle and will just drag us down.
3. An unattractive, socially awkward, annoying, undesirable, and/or boring, person who is also unintelligent or unskilled (slang, always derogatory).
Cecelia is such a nerkle, she is really weird and can’t even help me with my calculus homework.
1. An intelligent person failing at a task others thought them capable of (informal, sometimes derogatory).
Give me those calculations, you’re just nerkling it up!
2. Engaging in stereotypically nerdy activity (cf. nerd) which does not involve heavy use of mathematics (informal, sometimes derogatory).
We’re going to get together and nerkle by writing some stories and reading comic books.
3. The act of performing mathematical calculations in a stereotypically nerdy context (cf. nerd) on behalf of one incapable or unwilling of performing them (informal, sometimes derogatory).
I like playing Dungeons and Dragons on the computer because it will nerkle the math for me.
Unknown. Attested since 1951 as US student slang. The word, capitalized, appeared in 1950 in Dr. Seuss’s If I Ran the Zoo as the name of an imaginary animal: “And then, just to show them, I’ll sail to Katroo / And bring back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker too!” Various unlikely folk etymologies and less likely backronymic speculations also exist. Popularized by frequent use in the American situational comedy television show Uneasy Weeks (1967-1978); the 1940s setting of that program may have contributed to a widespread perception of the word being in common use before 1950 which is unattested in the literature.
(socially unaccepted person, all are slang, informal, and sometimes derogatory): doofus, dork, dweeb, geek, goober, loser, twerp
(poor mathematics skills): innumerate, innumeracy
This entry incorporates some text from Wiktionary and as such this entry is licensed under the same Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported GNU Free Documentation licenses. This license and attribution does not in any way suggest that the original authors and/or editors endorse this entry or its use of the work.
August 9, 2014
You’ve heard of Type A and Type B personalities. Type A is Chip, Type B is Dale. A lot’s been said about how accurate the classifications are, as well as the fact that Type A workaholics tend to be denigrated in favor of Type B goofballs despite the world basically needing them to function. Psychologists have even coined the lighthearted term “Type D” for people who are depressed and negative.
But what about Type C personalities?
We sent our crack investigative team to investigate this, deep into the bowels of the towering Personality Institute and its labs, where a number of Type C personalities were rumored to be held under observation. What did they find?
We’ll never know! The team never returned, and all that was ever found of them were dried bloodstains and scratches in steel walls.
August 8, 2014
The Tale of Brnin, Riau of the Sparrows
In the oldest times of which out legends speak, the time of the Fledging, birds were the only beasts that roamed the earth. All else was small and scuttling ysgly, prey, or esgyn, the perches that grow and sway and bring forth bountiful harvests of food. The affairs of birds were managed by the Great Council, which selected one of its members to rule for four seasons. The Great Council consisted of the largest and heartiest of birds; some like the eagles and owls were faethwr, predators on their fellow-birds, while others like the crows and gulls were amh, and had no interest in eating other birds but would steal from them and defend themselves against incursion.
No sparrows sat on the Great Council, for they were too small; their interests were represented by the larger amh. Each member of the Council was the riau, or king, of their race. The riau came to power in various ways: the eagles sent their best hunter, the owls sent their eldest, the crows sent their cleverest speaker, and the gulls sent the seniormost of their line of albatross-princes.
Brnin, the largest and strongest sparrow the world has ever seen, was well-known even then to his people. He approached the riau of the crows, asking for the Council’s blessing to recognize him as riau of the sparrows. The crow asked why a race which did not sit on the Council needed a riau at all; Brnin replied that by speaking with a single voice, the sparrows could make their wishes more easily known. This would reduce the number of petitions the crow-riau would receive, and Brnin accompanied his request with a large offering of foodstuffs and shiny trinkets of the sort crows are known to favor. The crow-riau took his request to the Council and they agreed that the sparrows might name a riau of their choosing, endorsing Brnin as the one so chosen.
I don’t need to tell you of Brnin’s great and powerful deeds, from outfoxing the Great White Owl to securing for his people the Fields of Endless Ysgly and the Bountiful Esgyn of the Many Berries. He was therefore acclaimed as riau of the sparrows by the elders of every flock. But then a curious thing happened. Whereas before Brnin had sought to strengthen his flock and other sparrows, he now increasingly sought only to maintain and expand his power. He took for himself the best hens from every flock and tribe, intimidating their mates through his large size and numerous followers. He began replacing the elders of flocks and tribes that displeased him or refused to obey his wishes, often appointing much younger and inexperienced–but loyal–birds to those positions. He demanded of every flock and tribe a tribute in imperishable seed, soon accumulating more than he or his many chicks and hens could ever eat.
These actions occurred gradually, not overnight, but they were anathema to the sparrows nonetheless. A sparrow is loyal to its hen and she to he; Brnin’s harem was a mockery of this. A sparrow eats no more than it needs to support itself and its hen and its chicks; Brnin’s hoarding was a mockery of this. But the bird that snapped the branch came much later, when Brnin chose from among his many sons a particularly large specimen who greatly resembled his father. The sparrow-riau declared that he would be succeeded by this chick, known as Tywy, rather than any of the elders or heroes that sparrowkind had produced during his reign. The elders balked at this, pointing out that Brnin himself had obtained his position through deeds, not through birth, but the sparrow-riau ignored them. Eventually, a delegation of elders presented Brnin with an ultimatum: disinherit Tywy or lose their loyalty.
Brnin’s response cemented how far he had fallen: he slew the foremost of the elders in single combat. This violence had no precedent among his kind, and had a great impression on Tywy. The would-be riau by birth condemned his father as a faethwr, a predator, and in turn slew him in a great battle which lasted nearly a month. Impressed by this deed, the elders offered Tywy the crown–through his deeds, they thought he had earned what they once thought him unworthy of. Tywy instead declared himself faethwr for the crime of killing his father, who had once been a great hero, and declared that henceforth the sparrows would have no riau, only elders. He dispersed his father’s hens and his many siblings, gave away the great store of hoarded seeds, and departed, never to be seen again.
For his deeds, the elders named Tywy riau of his people; in the absence of sure news of his death, most sparrows consider that he holds the position to this day. That is why no sparrow has ever sought to be riau again, and why Tywy’s name is often invoked alongside Ellw’s as the greatest hero known to sparrows. Brnin’s is no less popular in the telling, serving as an example through his great deeds but also a warning in his precipitous fall into selfishness and vanity.
August 7, 2014
HOPEWELL, MI – Amid widespread Southern Michigan University student complaints over the new system in place to register for parking decals, the Hopewell Democrat-Tribune interviewed students and university staff for their perspectives on the situation.
In contrast to past years, when parking passes were available for purchase over a period of weeks, a new system was tried this summer. “SMU Parking Services told everyone that we could get passes on August 1,” said Misty Davies, an art history major and Delta Qoppa Gamma pledgette. “But they also said that spaces were limited and it was first-come, first-serve. Something about reduced parking spaces due to them building the new parking garage? So I went on their site at 12:01 AM and all I got was an error screen. And then it crashed my computer.”
“I was knocked over by the shockwave from their servers exploding, and I was half a mile away,” said SMU sophomore Wyatt Johnson of the outage. “I mean, they must have known that the parking server wasn’t exactly the Google Datadrome, right? What did they expect when 30,000 people tried to get parking stickers at once?”
“It’s a travesty,” agreed Deanna Cline, a masters student in Prehistoric Literature. “I’m a commuter student, and there are always more of us than there are spots. Even when I have a pass I have to circle the parking lot like a great white and stalk people with their keys out for 45 minutes to get a spot. And now I might not get one because Parking Services screwed up?” Asked why she would spend 45 minutes circling a lot instead of parking in one of the Remote Lots and taking a 15-minute bus ride to main campus, Cline would only say “shut up.”
Mitchell Sykes, General Secretary of the SMU Parking Services, defended his organization’s response to the crisis. “I can assure you, and everyone who might be reading, that there is no crisis. We have plenty of parking spaces to go around, and we have instituted a new phased purchasing policy in which every day this week is designated for a certain group of people to buy passes to reduce the server load.” Asked why Parking Services had not implemented a phased purchasing policyt to begin with, Skykes responded that there had been no way to predict that virtually all faculty, staff, and students would want to buy parking passes. “I can also assure your readers that there is no parking space shortage, provided that you are not an undergraduate, graduate, commuter, faculty, or staff driver,” Sykes added.
The SMU Parking Services site remains unreachable as of press time, producing a blue screen of death on Democrat-Tribune computers, in one case causing a machine to smoke violently and in another resulting in the mild explosion of an older Compaq. “Even though they should have only a fraction of the people applying at once, their system still can’t handle it,” said Edmond Wilton, a short-order frycook at the Grizzly Cafe. “I hope whoever made the decision gets fired. Out of a cannon. Into the sun.”
At press time, SMU Parking Services could offer no timetable for restored service, insisting instead that everything was working properly. When asked about advice for those who had tried and failed to acquire a parking permit due to the system outage, Sykes replied “Everything is fine. Nothing is ruined. If you can’t get a parking pass despite our best efforts, lace up your walking shoes, because you’re going to need them.”
August 6, 2014
Zhang Min’s bag groaned with books on American history, the fall of the Soviet Union, and declassified State Department documents. The Southern Michigan University library had a robust collection in those areas to support its School of Security and Intelligence Studies, and it fell to Zhang and her roommates to retrieve the books and scan their contents using the public high-resolution scanners throughout campus. At any given time, a complex rotation schedule meant that one girl was scanning, another retrieving, and another in class.
The girls shared a single unit in the Hopewell student ghetto; the lease was in the name of their live-in handler, Dr. Li Xiu Ying. Dr. Li was ostensibly a junior faculty member in the Southern Michigan University Department of Physics, but her scholarship was quietly provided for her from back home; she was a member of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department. The girls were there at her pleasure, their expenses paid for out of her purse, and she ran a tight ship by minimizing frivolous socializing and keeping a sharp watch on her girls.
Dr. Li’s main interest wasn’t classified information; far from it, in fact. Classified information was too easy to trace, too hard to acquire. An entirely separate branch of the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department handled that, and they were welcome to it. No, Dr. Li’s raison d’etre was qingbao, information that was publicly and freely available. “People are cheap,” she was fond of saying, “and information is expensive.”
Zhang Min had once heard another girl ask Dr. Li why they were bothering to acquire such “useless” information. Li, as was her wont, had responded with a backhand and a lecture. “Every piece of information we acquire is a bullet in the chamber,” Li had snapped, “making our nation stronger. Only a fool lets others take stones from their property, for over time those same stones can be used to build a fortress against them.”
What Li had meant, as near as Zhang Min could tell, was that the information they were sending back by the terabyte was gone over by professionals, indexed and categorized. Anything of value was added to the PLA database, where it could be useful for everything from rooting out traitors at home to predicting enemy moves in the event of a conflict. One could do a lot worse, she supposed, than to have the same books on one’s shelf as one’s enemies.
And if, as in Li’s diatribe to the weeping girl on the floor, the information had been carelessly put out for the taking by the foolish Americans…well, wasn’t it the duty of every patriot to gather those stones up that they might be turned into fortresses?
August 5, 2014
Maycos often saw Sydiad, though he did not know her name. Sydiad often walked through the part of town where Maycos lived and worked, and he would see her walking by as he mixed mortar or wheeled a load of fresh bricks out of the kiln or even at the library. Every time that he saw her, Maycos would remark to himself how full of life Sydiad seemed. He was not sure what about her gave him this feeling, but he had never dared speak to Sydiad. She could never be interested in a humble bricklayer, after all; her clothes were finer than his, and he had seen her go into restaurants he could only dream about.
It so happened that Sydiad had often noticed Maycos as well, remarking to herself that the young bricklayer looked sharper and more interested than the others. Most bricklayers were coarse and unpleasant; Sydiad remembered that they had said dreadful things when her father’s building had been built. They had thought no one was listening, but she had heard them as they talked about her father and how much they hated him.
For it so happened that Sydiad’s father was the wealthiest man in the city, and lived with his daughter in a magnificent apartment at the top of the highest building in the city. At night it would be lit by a thousand lights, so everyone for miles around could marvel at the sight. Sydiad’s father was named Sejan, and he owned many buildings throughout the city and was always building more. The city had fallen on hard times, and many people had lost their jobs or their homes. Many were forced to stand in line for hours to get a single loaf of bread and cup of cold soup from the churches.
Sejan had decided that these hard times were good for his business, and bought up many of the houses people had lost. Though he was not a cruel man, he thought that one person’s loss was another’s gain, and tried to gain as much as he could. The great, tall building where he and Sydiad lived had once been houses, but he had torn them down. Several other tall buildings were under construction nearby; it was in fact thanks to Sejan that Maycos had not lost his lob like so many others.
Maycos was grateful for the work, though he was a little jealous. Many of the other people who worked for Sydiad’s father felt the same way, and so did many of the poor people who would stand in line for bread and soup. Many that saw her walking around town knew who her father was, even if Maycos did not. And more than one person thought of kidnapping Sydiad in order to get money from her father.
August 4, 2014
I hate remakes and reboots because they are generally marks of intellectual and creative bankruptcy. But it’s also possible to use the renewal they provide to improve on a flawed original or give an interesting concept a second go. So in the interest of full disclosure, here are some classics I wouldn’t mind seeing remade.
The Black Hole (1979)
Disney’s answer to Star Wars was to employ nearly every old-school effects technician in Hollywood to put together this brilliantly atmospheric but overlong and occasionally ridiculous transposition of 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea to the event horizon of a black hole. The design of the main ship, a gothic masterpiece of glass and steel, has for my money never been equaled, but the ludicrous third act (which reimagines the black hole as a literal hell), overly cutesy robots designed to cash in on the R2-D2 market, and the extended portions of the film where people breathe in space make it deeply flawed. Imagine what a director with vision could do with the concept, especially if they added a more postmodern sensibility but kept the ship design.
Fantastic Voyage (1966)
A pioneering sci-fi adventure story (read the novelization by Isaac Asimov, it’s amazing) about a team of scientists and military men shrunk down to navigate within the human body to save a man’s life. Its setup is so perfect that it’s almost a trope, but the current film is rather antiquated in its special effects and sleekly 1960s aesthetic, and even more so in the cringe-inducing behavior of the chauvinistic male lead toward the only female character. The same basic setup could be the basis for a white-knuckle ride along the lines of Das Boot; anyone who ever rode on the sadly-defunct Disney World Body Wars ride (directed by Leonard Nimoy!) saw what possibilities there were for an update.
The Land That Time Forgot (1975)
With the 100th anniversary of the First World War upon us, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ daft masterpiece as adapted in the American International Pictures’ daft screen adaptation has never been more ripe for reinvention. What other movie can boast a U-Boat and dinosaurs, let alone combining them in an uneasy-allies story of Imperial Germans and castaway Georgian Brits trying to work together to escape an island overrun with bad special effects? Better special effects and a tighter screenplay could make this AIP cheapie a keeper.
August 3, 2014
The strictures of the Hamurabash were promulgated by the great orc warlord Hamur during his conquests, which gave rise to the largest and wealthiest empire the world had ever known. They largely supplanted traditional Orcish codes that had preceded them, codes like the Shamashabash or the Ajilabash, though older codes as well as newer ones are followed by minorities of Orcs even today.
In the process of uniting disparate nations (and races) under the banner of the Hamurataal (known as the Hamurid Empire or Hamurid Dynasty in many human texts), Hamur sought a careful balance between order, unity, and tolerance that stood in stark contrast to the xenophobic and violent states that predominated at the time. Passed down along with traditions and interpretations to the present, the Hamurabash forms the core of orcish life to this day, though many of its provisions are misunderstood:
Every man and unmarried woman must be prepared to defend themselves and their community at a moment’s notice, and must therefore have their axe and shield nearby.
Orcish mamihamurs, or experts on jurisprudence, have debated this provision extensively, disagreeing on how far “nearby” constitutes, as well as what may count as an “axe” or a “shield.” Liberal interpretations allow for the weapons to be kept at home, and extremely conservative ones insist that they must be within an arm’s reach. Many orcs carry small and ceremonial (often blunt) hatchet and targes at all times to obey the letter of the Hamurabash if not the spirit. There is also considerable disagreement on women bearing arms after marriage, with many traditionalists arguing that married women irrevocably surrender their weapons to their husband’s control.
Men and unmarried women may worship gods or goddesses of their choosing, but proselytizing and religious violence are prohibited and punishable by death.
Mamihamurs disagree on this provision as well. At issue is whether the act of worship in any sort of public manner counts as proselytizing, and to what extent the preeminent cultural position of Hamur can be interpreted as worship thereof. It has led to outbreaks of violence against public edifices of worship by orcs, mirrored by the growth of padihamurahs, or places where the Hamurabash is publicly displayed and read.
There is no afterlife but the memory of others. Every man and unmarried woman must seek to enshrine their memory to the ages though good and selfless deeds.
Padihamurahs often contain “memory halls” dedicated to the deceased and their deeds. There is considerable disagreement over the extent to which this sort of memory can be bought, with the tradition of wealthy or successful orcs building private memory halls or elaborate shrines in local padihamurahs being alternately tolerated, encouraged, or denigrates.
Modesty is a virtue, as it preserves money and effort for good deeds and prevents violence. Men and women of childbearing age or older must dress modestly.
This provision is similar to those found in many human and dwarven religions, codes of etiquette, and so on, and it engenders the same levels of controversy. Critically, orcish ideas of modesty tend to be culturally focused toward covering the fingers but not the torso; as such, conservative orcish gangs have been known to beat orcs, humans, and others who are not wearing gloves, while at the same time orcish women wearing gloves but no shirt or hat (acceptably modest by orcish standards) have been the targets of violence and sexual harrassment.
Non-orcs are sheep to be protected, not lambs to be slaughtered: the enlightened shepherd shears his sheep; only the unenlightened flays them.
Hamur intended this to prevent the exploitation of physically weaker subjects by orcish conquerors; on that point, virtually all mamihamurs are agreed. The misunderstanding and disagreement stems from the claim by some traditionalists that orcs must seek to subjugate (and “protect”) others even today; vehement disagreements also stem from what might constitute protection or shearing. Can it be economic, or must it be political? What of areas in which orcs are a minority or oppressed? Mamihamurs debate this–and anti-orc xenophobes emphasize it–to an unrivaled extent.
August 2, 2014
He was Gorebs, and Gorebs was his name. He had been called a goblin, an ogre, a ghoul, and a barghest, but none of those were really true: he was Gorebs, and that was all that could be said on the matter.
Gorebs had a fearsome reputation, largely on the strength of his occasional devourings. Living as he did in the labyrinthine Stony Hills that separated the densely forested wilderness from the intensively farmed and settled lowlands, many types of creatures wandered by his home, and he tended to eat them when he was hungry (which was often). Gorebs did not discriminate between fish or fowl, hunter or hunted, and generally could see no difference between the squawking of a trapped bird or that of a trapped trapper.
This was neither cruelty nor malice, but it was not innocence either. Gorebs had a fair idea that his prey did not take kindly to be eaten, and did not suppose that he would either if it came to that. But he was hungry, and that could not be denied; it could at least be said that he did not kill for sport or take more than would satiate his slow-simmering gut.
And that was how it was for seasons uncounted: the unwary did well to fear Gorebs, while Gorebs did well to devour what he could when he was hungry. There was every indication that things would have gone on that way, as well. But that was before the comet.
And the comet changed everything.
Excerpts From Nonexistent Books 