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Amble on and we’ll
pore sweat over maps
and plumb with a limestone
snap and mark twain.
This is the culvert
where I first met you.
Or the summer swing
empty but for crows.
Or a dark horse promenade
with peacock feathers
and coruscant crystal.
Or, more likely, the one
octave fingers of a hand
and the three cracking
joints of a finger
all built for the fabulous
black suns arranged
ringside to the red river.

Toddle on and we’ll
find our sea feet
to the rise and swell
of brine and food, in an
awkward displacy of glances
passing this way and that
over a meniscus border.
Or, I’ll see you haven’t
been who you are
for a long while now,
the seasons colouring in
and changing and colliding,
hazelnut to streaked wheat
and back again, the way
the fabulous blazing white
sun almost made its home
ringside to the red river.

Well and we’ll cross like
ships in the night in the war
in the lines fraught, familiar.
Well and you’ll glisten like
crystal as the moon forces
the brightness out of you,
the force of which is this,
lament and broken singsong
canticle across time and space
to the place where I first
remember convincing you to
turn that terrible blazing
Polaris away from crossing
the red river, from crossing
the Rubicon and releasing its
puissance into space.

• [rocksmyfaceoff.info] » Blog Archive » Rumor Forum Downtime
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I remember the last year I went to Camp Tamarack (and thanks for the memory, Facebook) there was this speaker there, a very good one in fact, who shall go unnamed for the sake of, well, not having Google searches for it end up here.

I don’t think I’ve ever written that many notes before, disagreeing with a single public speaking on any issue, including politics. While almost all of my then-friends were lapping everything he said up (though that phrase is a bit loaded, forgive me), I was wondering if they had all lost their critical thinking skills and were simply basking in the glow of his admittedly excellent oratory. Doesn’t the very scripture this gentleman was expounding require the weighing and balancing of everything? Doesn’t it say that there’s no room for private interpretation, that adding things in is a bad idea, and you know, don’t mess around trying to make personal convictions into doctrine?

Maybe I never really recovered from that week of seminars; it left me sort of jaded, as if no-one really cares to evaluate what they hear. Or worse, no-one’s capable. Or worse yet, there’s something completely wrong with me and I’m looking at thing ass-backwards. Sometimes I think it might be that last one.

I have not the exousia nor any expectation of it, but it seems to me that if a man proclaims himself pope exiguus and begins to pass down ex cathedra (even if he’s never said or even never thought either of these things), you have a more dangerous situation that the actual Catholic church, where at least things are oh so very clear.

Once, a man in a particularly exclusive club told me that “we don’t have a dress code here.” Yet everyone dressed the same, and the room exuded this pressure that says, “you must dress this way.” I’ve often wondered what the difference was, and if that man was being intentionally disingenuous or not. I image he wasn’t, although in retrospect this is all rather academic.

I say this to ask a question. What’s the difference between a group of people with an ossified power structure and extra-scriptural doctrine and other accoutrements of that nature, and a group of people who have a non-obvious ossified power structure with a bunch of extra-scriptural doctrines that aren’t actually called doctrines but are followed dogmatically nonetheless? As far as I can tell, the difference is that one group of people is simply more honest than the other; over-simplified, but true, I think.

The difference between a real pope and a bunch of minipopes is just in the robes, I think. The minipopes are part of this more democratic papal state, one that’s a little more free-wheeling, one that’s not particularly organized, but they get to say whatever they want to say as long as it’s crouched in the vernacular of holiness, as long as it’s in this or that particular dialect of Christianese.

Makes you wonder why God didn’t just drop down some bullet points instead, right? I mean, if he’d done that, we’d be able to actually say a lot of things with a lot of certainty, instead a few things with certainty and a lot of things with none at all. But as one of those minipopes said, unfortunately we’re still on this side of the pearly gates; and as a minipope of an entirely different stripe said, perhaps clarity is over-rated.

I have a new mobile phone, and if you want to know the number you should email and ask me. On the other hand, if you don’t have my email address, just call my new mobile.

On my way to work, 680 News reported that disgruntled Sopranos fans had “hacked” into Wikipedia and changed a line in the creator of the show’s biography page to read that he had destroyed the show. According to 680 News, after these brave individuals “hacked” into the page, Wikipedia “disabled” the profile.

I understand that this was a fluff piece, about 30 seconds of news time that will probably only ever get repeated a couple of times. But seriously; how hard is it to get even the most simple of facts right? How hard is it to be precisely right instead of vaguely wrong? I know what they were trying to say, of course, because I know Wikipedia, but imagine what sort of impression that might make on those who don’t.

For instance, you don’t “hack” Wikipedia. You edit it. Anyone can do it, and vandalism is a pretty frequent occurrence, especially in Political, Religious, and Pop Culture pages.

Second, Wikipedia didn’t “disable” the “profile”, they simply locked the biography page down so unregistered and newly registered can’t edit it.

Third, fans? Plural? You think a group of people conspired to do this? I’m pretty sure it was just one guy. Unless they have multi-user keyboard and Wikivandal parties now.

Well, it turns out the old saying is true: if more than one person knows a secret, it’s no longer a secret. I hate not being able to trust people with information, but at least eventually you know who to scratch off that list. You know. That list.

A wall. A place to hide. A flagging breath, half-mast.
A bed half-occupied. A fridge to keep the past
fresh in your mind.

Let me confess a pause. A moment of regret,
considering the cause that you don’t realize yet
or understand.

Hard to explain. How does it feel?
Hard to explain how it’s heavy.
Rage into pain. Pain into steel.
Steel to weigh down, oh it’s heavy.

Okay. You paint it white. I’ll be the only stain.
The innocent is right, the guilty takes the blame,
but which are you?

Equivocate. Deny. The sophist in your head
would rather weigh a lie against the grateful dead
than know the truth.

Hard to explain. How does it feel?
Hard to explain how it’s heavy.
Rage into pain. Pain into steel.
Steel to weigh down, oh it’s heavy.

Better to bury sleeping hounds.
Murder the silent angels.
Better amnesia than the sound
of restless chain and how they’re
heavy.

A mask. Something to hide. A game you never won.
A life half-occupied. A race always half-run.
Your legs, your arms, your heart,
they’re heavy.

Part 1

Wind-whipped and obscenely wild, the mountain range stood as if it had been anchored to the ground for thousands of years, though Anachronist was fairly certain it had not been there for more than a few hundred. This far north the terrain was uncertain of itself, jutting out from itself strangely in countless places, but even these mountains could not have been formed by any natural cause. No, they rose from the Kghavyx plains awkwardly, strangely, as if someone or something had simply deposited them there. Where the plains were blanketed in scrub grasses and low brush, the mountains were cloaking in a thick tangle of trees that reached almost to the snow-covered caps, an utterly foreign forest that seemed to be spreading out from the mountain.

A plain that would soon be forest as well, the face of an entire continent irrevocably changed with the range’s arrival. As he strode toward them, Anachronist imagined the sheer power that could cause an entire range of mountains to be created. Or, even worse, moved from… somewhere else.

The shiver that ran through his body, he was almost certain, was from that thought, and not entirely effected by the unending cold of the northern plains. (this sentence is awkward, change it)

“They call this summer,” he remarked to the Mask, who trailed behind him, moving silently in his wake. “I imagine the winter might test even a god’s fortitude.”

The Mask, busy scanning whatever it was she could sense on the horizon, didn’t reply. She raised her crossbow. “Stop.”

“Curse your lovely eyes. What is it?”

She pointed slightly to the left. “Smoke. A dwelling, or a camp over the rise.”

Anachronist grinned. “Ah, the fabled Kghavyx shepherds, perhaps?”

“Perhaps.” Her mask twisted into an expression of mock disgust. “I suppose you’ll want to go meet them. Crazy fool.”

“To test their mettle,” he said, picking up the pace once more. “And maybe even mine.”

They crested the rise in silence, to find it not so much a rise as a hill overlooking a deep—or what passed for deep in the plains—valley. A valley filled with sheep. Several fires dotted the fringes of the valley, surrounded by a dozen or so tents.

“I imagine you’ll find shepherds here,” she said.

A nod. Another grin, a little crazier this time. (show, don’t tell, change this wording) “Yes, I imagine so. Unless these are wild sheep, the fear of whose ferocity chills my blood.”

The Mask slipped a quarrel into her crossbow, mounting it with a strength and speed that belied her slender frame. “Your weapons,” she prompted.

“Let’s make it a fair fight,” he said. “My hands versus all things metal and pointed.”

“Your death,” shrugged the Mask. Anachronist’s answer was an almost girlish giggle. “We’ve been seen.” (not sure this fits together right… maybe break into two lines)

He could see movement ahead. Then off to one side, and the other, and, when he looked back, behind them. “Good. They’re quick.”

Something hissed through the air. The Mask ducked, and Anachronist saw an arrow embed itself in the grass at his feet. He nodded, impressed; the arrow had come from one of the figures in the distance, figures approaching, longbows drawn. The shepherds, it appeared, were not entirely the pastoral sort.

Then the flurry. The Mask dodged and wove between the arrows that didn’t quite seem to reach Anachronist, moving with what he though was remarkable grace. She left trails in the air, she was moving so fast, seeming in more than one place at a time.
Anachronist, on the other hand was in more than one place. He called on Elnomia Sercc, and it answered, thrumming deep inside him, bursting to life like a slumbering fire disturbed. Crackling with unseen energy he… divided. And divided and divided until there were ten, fifteen, twenty Anachronists all streaming and flowing around the Mask.

The arrows passed through all off him, a hail of them, while the Mask danced faster, and then streaked forward, a blur carving a path of broken grass toward an advancing archer.

Whose head jerked back, arterial blood arcing through the air. He was still folding in on himself when another archer cried out and stumbled backwards, hands clutching at a quarrel embedded in his eye. The shepherds began to panic then, firing arrow after arrow at where the masked assassin had just been, as archers began dying with ever-increasing rapidity.

The last one with a knife angled up between the ribs, lancing into his heart. As the Mask jerked it loose, the man’s eyes widened; he began to say something, cut off suddenly as she dealt him a kick to the head. His neck snapped like small thunder.

Then there was only one Anachronist, his multiples disappearing like they had been simply shut off. “Well, that was fun,” he announced cheerfully. (More action? Show off Anachronist a bit more?)

A man seemed to rise from the plain in front of him, crossbow mounted, a cap of grass falling to the side. He released the quarrel, an arms-length from Anachronist’s face, and flung himself to the side, screaming a war cry.

Anachronist plucked it easily out the air and hurled it back. The quarrel buried itself in the man’s open mouth. Chunks of flesh and bone exploded outwards, the impact driving the man into the grass.

“A pre-dug grave,” the Mask remarked, returning, looking down at the pit the archer had risen from. She began cleaning the blood off her knife and hands with the edge of her tunic. “How thoughtful.”

* * *

He was turning a hare over a fire on a spit when the Mask returned. “Anything?”

“No,” she replied, laying down her quarrel beside the fire. “Some tracks, but nothing particularly fresh. Well, except for that.” She pointed to the impaled animal.

“A man needs to eat,” Anachronist said.

“A god doesn’t,” the Mask pointed out. “But I suppose you miss eating, being a sentimental fool.”

“I have,” said Anachronist, “endeavoured to number the times you’ve called me a fool today. I needed seven of me, all counting on our fingers.”

“You’ll need a small army of you before this is over,” she replied, snapping off a bit of hare and tasting it gingerly. “And this tastes like Take’s own frostbitten toe.”

“I ceaselessly plumb my memory to find where I asked your opinion.”

“You asked me along on our little venture here,” the Mask reminded him, “which of course means you’re entitled to my opinion.”

“A dubious honour I bear with great ambivalence.” He rotated the spit. “How long till we’ve cleared these ridiculously badly-built mountains?”

“Tomorrow. We’re almost through now, which is a miracle in itself.”

Anachronist slid the hare off the spit. “I can feel the paths leading left and right,” he said. He began gnawing on a leg. “In circles. And the skeletons!” he said, between mouthfuls. “I would very much like to know how the Kghavyxu, the great agnostics, the blessed unbelievers, the worshipers of iron, the cave-dwellers, deserving greater invective, almost, than this hare which seems to have been fed wire and twine its entire life, came to have a series of mountains filled with arcane sorcery protecting their land.” (starting to sound a bit too much like Croup and Vandemaar)

“They probably died out during that sentence, and we’ll never know,” (zing!)the Mask said dryly. “Or perhaps they’re not as agnostic as they once were.”

“They don’t worship me.” Anachronist tried to suck the marrow out of one of the boned. “Which is all that matters, really.” He grimaced. “And this does indeed taste like Take’s frostbitten toe. I’m not entirely certain what I was thinking.”

In our office, we have two Windows 2000 servers, both of which are working just fine and doing their jobs without undue strain on the hardware. I estimate we could keep both of them going and doing what they’re doing for another three years.

Microsoft, of course, has other ideas. Support has ended or is ending for Windows 2000–their most stable OS to date in my experience–and in order to keep a well-patched web-facing server alive, we have two choices. One, we upgrade to Server 2003, and replace the boxes as well, as they’re pretty old and probably won’t handle 2003. Two, we keep what we’ve got, understanding that if vulnerabilities are found, we’ll be, well, vulnerable. Either we pay out a large ($10,000 or so) sum to upgrade, or we cross our fingers and hope for the best.

We’re a small company with a small technology budget. Guess what we’re going to do? I hate crappy hardware and upgrade cycles; there’s no good reason that a well-made server and operating system shouldn’t run for ten years without breaking down or becoming out of date. And not something you need a forklift to move.

On a related note, what is it with operating systems and applications devouring RAM and disk space? I mean, I understand that computing is more complicated than it once was, but Windows 95–piece of all-dancing crap that it was–took something like 25mb of RAM to run. Something like that. These days, only Mac OSX gets faster with each release, and I’m not sure how they can keep that up. Linux gather more moss with each passing day, and Microsoft Windows is positively ballooning with each new and less-needed version.

I ask myself a simple question: what sort of insane processing power, HD space, and RAM will one need to simply check ones email in 2015?