Posted on November 1, 2005 by Jenna
Halloween Hello!
Miscellaneous business: donations for October totalled $0.00—the spookiest number! Also, I flailed a lot and moved glacially on other Hitherby-related projects. That’s probably my bad health at work, but it could be procrastination! It’s always hard to tell. On the other hand, I actually made some progress on Society of Flowers, so that’s good.
Thank you for your kind words, all!
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I note, also, that radiation from leaking nuclear power plants is no substitute for marriage counseling.
— Metal Fatigue
But, on the plus side, it’s free!
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The Toast People in Toast City must be depressed that they’ve lost their title to Bread City.
— Eronarn
Toast people don’t know how good they’ve got it.
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Rebecca, did someone just give you an Age Of Wire and String?
— James Wallis
Nope! What’s that?
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I find the Lethal Magnet School stories to be interesting. They have a somewhat different feel than regular Hitherby, but I’ve not yet been able to pick out the differences.
— Eric
It’s the realism!
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not just answers, but answers that don’t beg questions.
— GoldenH
Hm!
In general, I’m trying to lay groundwork while deferring questions, not so much beg them.
**
Would Mlle. Borgstrom be terribly offended if I wrote up a screenplay based on this line of storytelling and submitted it to a certain contest run by a fellow internet-dweller? He and his film crew want to make a HD movie but lack any sort of skilled writer to follow. I was going to take a shot at an original piece, but Hitherby is much more inspiring than my own writings.
— Eronarn
Huh?
… I’m sorry I failed to answer this at the time. But now I’m really confused. Does HD stand for Hitherby Dragons? Is the contest being run by the same person who wants to make an HD movie?
In sum, this is deeply confusing to me. I certainly wouldn’t be offended, per se. If you need legal permission, bug my agent Hitherby_Admin via a private message or something. ^_^
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The question made me wonder if Hitherby had spent a bit too much time reading the Forge or stuff informed by it or the games designed by the major players there (Dogs in the Vinyard, Prime Time Adventures, etc).
— mneme
Nope!
I have great respect for Mr. Baker, but I’ve never read DitV, have only spent 4-5 hours at the Forge, and am almost entirely unfamiliar with Prime Time Adventures. Dogs is on the list of things I’ll buy when I can afford to, er, buy random things, again; PTA is something I’m curious about but I’m hoping to make one of my friends buy it sometime instead.
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Having just been blessed with my first child in the last month these snippets mean so much to me.
— Taliskar
Yay! Congratulations.
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//I’m going into the storm tomorrow, in more senses than one, and I’m going to spend some time there, and I read this when I’m scared, and it takes away the emptiness. It gives me an understanding of what I’m doing, and how, even in the middle of death and destruction and the ugly end of everything, I can laugh, in the middle of the snarling, gentle, killing rain of something wonderful.
I can’t be coherent about this, but it felt rude to receive such a gift without writing some sort of thank-you note, so, and I’m crying as I write this: Thank you.//
— mineownaardvarks
Thank you for your kind words. ^_^
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Er, if stuff from the past does get changed around, can we get some indication of what the changes were?
— David Goldfarb
I’ll announce it proudly. ^_^
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One fairly obvious loophole here is the “places people have never been” bit. Once the first couple of explorers have arrived, Pluto is no longer such a place, is it?
— David Goldfarb
Ha! I wondered if that would be too obvious. I’m so glad that was only the point of the first half of the story. ^_^
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Why do I dig something like (the Dhiyampati stories) so much more than Standing in the Storm?
— ADamiani
It’s the romanticism!
(Technically, I think that Dhiyampati and the Pluto Project is mechanistic rather than romantic, and Standing in the Storm is organic rather than realistic, but I’m not sure.)
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Reminds me of the debugging which takes up all my time nowadays. Unfortunately I’m always the one with the half-formed idea that turns out to be wrong…
— melsner
Suggest Satanic monkeys! It can’t be wrong every time!
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“Let’s talk about duck’s cocks,” she comments, to Martin, who is trying to eat his cereal without having a discussion of duck’s cocks and has, once again, failed.
— Ninjacrat
*giggle*
I like Penny Arcade.
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Brilliant.
— Ford Dent
Thank you!
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I did not know that Tobias was a bishounen.
— ScrewyAnathema
It’s not really established outside the doujinshi, but I assert that the preponderance of rabbinical interpretation suggests that he was smoking.
**
I’ll respond to the audience posts in an audience response thread next time I need a day off. ^_^
If I don’t, poke me!
For now, though, thank you for contributing audience posts, Jonathan Walton, David Goldfarb, William, and GoldenH!
Oh, and ADamiani. Sneaking it in just before the wire! ^_^
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what, no smurfs?
— mark
The presence or absence of smurfs in a story is apparently more controversial than I’d realized. *^_^*;;
… And I don’t understand why. Aren’t most stories more or less the same with or without smurfs? I mean, what would really have been different if Neo was One Smurf instead of The One? If La Femme Nikita had been Smurfette Nikita? If the mothersmurfing *Bible* had been about Papa Smurf, Sacrificial Smurf, and Transcendent Smurf? When they sat down to write the script for Se7en do you honestly think they specifically said, “Okay, and the killer shouldn’t be a smurf,” or did it just kind of turn out that it smurfed the story better in that particular case to avoid the use of Smurfisms? Isn’t this just another example of the entrenched azraelocracy’s smurfing smurfity-smurf assumptions trickling down until even the folks it smurfs, personally, wind up swallowing the whole mothersmurfing line hook, smurf, and sinker?
Can I get a “smurf yeah!”, yo?
Yeah. That’s right.
**
Christine’s Moving Castle!
— cariset
*giggle* This is just the month for people finding references to stuff I haven’t seen/read, isn’t it?
Did Howl’s castle have three legs?
Oh!
And that’s all for this month. Wow. Thanks for reading! Thanks for commenting! See you again this time next month!
Categories: Letters Columns, Additional Content, Uncategorized