Jump to content

Pariah

HERO Member
  • Posts

    45,222
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    196

Posts posted by Pariah

  1. 23 hours ago, Asperion said:

    Earth has been declared uninhabitable. Name some real planet that we need to be transported to, how many needs to get there,  and how we can reach that planet. 

     

    It's funny, I'm having my Astronomy class working on that problem right now. It involves an unnamed planet in a nearby star system; a crew of 20,000 to assure sufficient genetic diversity, and a generational ship that will make the trip in 50 years or so. 

  2. I recently got a copy of The Hobbit on CD from the local library. It's a good way to pass the time back and forth to school. There was a lot of it that I didn't remember; it's been decades since I read it.

     

    My next thought was to get The Fellowship of the Ring, but there are 20 some odd people in line ahead of me for it. So instead I checked out a different audiobook, The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley. Again, a book I've read before but it's been a very long time.

     

    (Spoilered for verbose summary.)

    Spoiler

    Our heroine, Aerin, is the daughter of the second wife of the King of Damar. She is tall and ungainly with pale skin and fiery red hair, unlike pretty much everyone else who has dark hair and ambiguously brown skin. Furthermore, her cousin and chief court rival Galanna continuously taunts her about her heritage, suggesting that her mother was a witch who seduced the king just to produce an heir. She also loves pointing out that the magic talent that those of the Royal Blood all exhibit has somehow skipped Aerin. Her only friend in all of this is another cousin, a kind young man named Tor who is the presumptive heir to the throne.

     

    After being goaded by Galanna into trying to prove her royal blood, and nearly dying in the effort, Aerin undergoes many months of rehabilitation that eventually finds her forging a friendship with her father's lame, retired war horse, learning swordplay, and developing a flame retardant ointment from a thousand year old book. So armed, she takes it upon herself to start slaying the small dragons that pester the periphery of the kingdom of Damar. Aerin gains a great deal of self-confidence and some measure of respect in the pursuit. But then, as her father and his army are called away to deal with an insurrection, she learns that Maur, the last great dragon from the old days, has awakened and is tormenting a nearby town. She goes looking for him and eventually finds him in a mountain valley.

     

    She manages to slay Maur, but is nearly killed herself in the process. Worse, she has been poisoned by the dragon, which eats away at both her health and her sanity. She can hear the dragon's voice in her head, a fact that is intensified when a couple of idiots in her father's army decide to bring the huge skull of the dragon home and mount it in the Great Hall as a trophy. The visions eventually prove too much, and Aerin leaves to seek out the help of a blonde haired man who's been appearing in her dreams.

     

    She finds the man, or perhaps he finds her, just in time to keep her from dying. He nurses her back to health and eventually bathes her in the Lake of Dreams, which makes her not quite mortal. His name is Luthe, and he's a wizard. He teaches her about an evil wizard who threatens all the world—and who happens to be her mother's brother. And yes, her mother was in fact a witch, and did marry the King in the hopes of producing a (male) heir who would defeat this wizard. Already frail and otherwise unwell, the birth of a daughter was too much for her to handle, and she died.

     

    Aerin learns what she can from the Luthe, who for various reasons cannot face the dark wizard himself, and then goes to seek out her malevolent uncle. In a battle that seems to transcend the limits of time, she fights and eventually defeats him, again nearly at the cost of her own life. In the process, she takes from him the Hero's Crown, a powerful artifact that was taken from the kings of Damar generations ago. Luthe drags her back to the present time and again brings her back to health. They become lovers, but Aerin knows she must return to her homeland.

     

    She arrives home to find a horde of literally inhuman Northerners has nearly taken the kingdom. She fights through the battle to find Tor, placing the Hero's Crown on his head. Her arrival, plus the bestowal of the Crown's power on Tor, is enough to turn the tide, and the Northerners are routed. But her father has been mortally wounded and dies in Aerin's arms.

     

    Tor becomes King and marries Aerin, whom he has always loved—even if she had never allowed herself to believe it—a few months later. The unnatural forces released during the battle have turned Damar from a pleasant wooded kingdom into a flat, arid desert. Aerin helps her people adjust to their new habitat and, she and Tor becomes legends in their own time. They live more or less happily ever after.

     

    McKinley does a great job with characterization and world building. Her descriptions of the people, the land,  the magic, and the otherworldly experiences Aerin has along the way are finely crafted. She tells a good story. It was quite enjoyable to re-familiarize myself with the book after so long.

     

    Although written two years later, this book is a thousand-year prequel to one of Robin McKinley's other works, The Blue Sword. That's what I'm listening to now.

     

     

  3. BYU draws a #6 in the East Region. They'll probably be heavy favorites over Duquesne in Omaha, after which they likely draw a much tougher opponent in #3 Illinois.

     

    Win those two games, and the Cougars go to Boston the following weekend and probably get #2 Iowa State ... who has already beaten them twice in conference play this year. 

     

    I did notice that three of the last four in were Boise, Colorado, and Colorado State. All three get #10 seeds ... and play-in games (Boise vs. CU, CSU vs. Virginia).  Crazy stuff.

  4. Wow, the Broncos must be really confident in Stidham for the coming year. 

     

    Either that, or they're planning to draft someone and throw them to the wolves in Week 1. 

     

    Cue Zack Wilson 2.0.

  5. I got my final grades posted yesterday, including for the Concurrent Enrollment class, which required some manipulation of the grade book program we use to bring it in compliance with the community college.

     

    I knew my CE class was going to be a learning curve; I didn't expect that it was going to look like Mount Everest.

     

    And yeah, the concert was amazing. I'll give you a full report later.

  6. 11 hours ago, unclevlad said:

    52 games today.

     

    The most important...

     

    Texas Tech 81, BYU 67.  

     

    If they were a 4?  This might knock them down into the dreaded 5 seed...12's beat 5's MUCH more often than 13's beat 4's.

     

    I've seen projections dropping them as far as 6. I don't think the Cougars will care much. They're just going to be excited to get in and to be favored in a first-round game. Neither of those things has happened much lately.

     

    Having said that, BYU has a notorious history of one-and-done in the Big Dance, so a first round upset is in no way out of the question. 

  7. If you smile at me, I will understand
    'Cause that is something everybody everywhere does
    In the same language


    I can see by your coat, my friend
    You're from the other side
    There's just one thing I got to know
    Can you tell me please, who won?


    Say, can I have some of your purple berries?
    Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now
    Haven't got sick once
    Probably keep us both alive


    Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy
    Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be
    Silver people on the shoreline, let us be
    Talkin' 'bout very free and easy
     

    Horror grips us as we watch you die
    All we can do is echo your anguished cries
    Stare as all human feelings die
    We are leaving, you don't need us

     

     

    Go, take your sister then, by the hand
    Lead her away from this foreign land
    Far away, where we might laugh again
    We are leaving, you don't need us


    And it's a fair wind blowin' warm
    Out of the south over my shoulder
    Guess I'll set a course and go

×
×
  • Create New...