me: oh yeah I really need to finish reading the YW NMES
me: *opens Deep Wizardry*
me: *starts crying at the epigraph*
Tag: young wizards
Hi, I’m auditioning for the part of Ponch and I’ll be singing Love Survives from All Dogs Go To Heaven
hi i’m here to audition for the part of fred and i’ll be singing firework by katy perry
“Games Wizards Play” Figment Friday #13: Boys
From Games Wizards Play chapter 8, “Hempstead / Mumbai”:
***
“Though still, even in a protected place like that,” [Mehrnaz’s mother] Dori
said, “there will, after all, still be a lot of unfamiliar wizards—”“Seniors,”
Dairine said with a put upon roll of the eyes, “and Advisories all over
the place, peering over our shoulders all the time…”“—and some of those wizards will be boys–”
Mehrnaz
suddenly became very interested in the plate of biscuits to her right
on the table, so that her face was turned away from her Mama’s while she
considered which one to pick next. Dairine, though, was positioned to
see her mentoree’s panicked expression through Spot’s eyes, as he was
sitting on Mehrnaz’s far side.Uh huh, Dairine thought. There we go. “Boys?” she said, incredulous, and laughed. “Dori, both of us are going to be way too busy with this to be thinking about boys. We’ve got work to do.”
“Well, yes, but it’s always when we’re thinking about other matters that things happen, isn’t it?”
And when Dori looked away while saying this, Dairine became absolutely sure she was thinking, Because it did with me.
“That is not going to be allowed to occur,” Dairine said. “Boys have their place in life, but not for the next two weeks.”
“Ah. And you don’t have a boyfriend either, then?”
Dairine looked Dori straight in the eye, and said in the Speech, “I have absolutely no interest in any guy on this planet.”
Mehrnaz’s
mother’s eyes widened at the sudden change of language. Then she looked
very relieved. “Oh well, that’s all right then,” she said…
*james bond voice* the name’s nuiiliat. roshaun ke nelaid am seriv am teliuyve am meseph am veliz am teriaunst am det nuiiliat.
#don’t even talk to me, #Dairine as a bond girl, #she’d probably get fed up w/ him halfway through the movie and tie him to a pipe and finish the mission herself
word
Young Wizards 30-Day OTP Challenge day 17: Spooning
***With thanks to Ursula Vernon for a most magic moment: see under the cut***
Once upon a time (or indeed once upon another time, if that suits you better: there’s always more time lying around), in the lounge bar of a pub in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland, a redheaded woman is kissing a pig.
Not just any woman, granted. And definitely not just any Pig.
In any case, none of this is as difficult as it might sound on first hearing, as the Pig is both graceful and light on his feet, and good at displacing his own mass in such a way as not to wreck the barstool on which he’s perched. Nor (from the redhead’s side of things) is this particularly an unpleasant experience, as the Pig’s facial bristles are on the soft side, and due to being fairly silvery to start with, almost invisible anyway — as if he’s wearing a very subtle and discreet version of designer stubble, with a slight glitter about it.
“Chao, bello.” It is of course a pun, a terrible one. “Mwah. Mwah.”
The redhead gets a third “Mwah” from the pig, then straightens up and looks at him quizzically. “Three? What, are we in Switzerland all of a sudden? Or no, of course you are. By definition.”
“And why not? Besides, a three for one deal, I’d think you’d be in favor. Value for money. Very Swiss. Anyway, I hear you’re planning to be crying on the bar up there shortly…” He grins.
“Oh, don’t you start tormenting me now! I can get that at home.” She rolls her eyes. “Yet another way for the BBC to break my heart, who needed that…? Come on, get yourself settled.”
No one in the bar shows the slightest sign of having noticed a redhead kissing the Pig hello a la Suisse, or the two of them settling in their respective seats. This is partly because all this is happening in the woman’s head, but also partly because this is one of her locals. And even if they could see what was going on, the neighbors (who’re by now well used to seeing this particular redhead with a red wine and a mineral water and a netbook and an iPad and a notebook on the bar in front of her, working on them all at once) would never be caught actually remarking on whatever she’s up to this time. At least not until she’s left.
“You comfortable?”
“Entirely.”
“What’s your pleasure? They’ve got Ballygowan if you’re on the clock.”
“You kidding? I’ve been on the clock since the local Big Bang, and no one cares when I punch out. Or is qualified to judge what I’m doing, whether I have or not. If you’re buying I’ll have a Remy, thankyouverymuch.”
Young Wizards meta (or meta meta): News about some old things, some new things, and excerpts from “Games Wizards Play”
(There, that’ll do as a placeholder image for the time being. In a while I’ll work something out with the Wizard’s Knot in it.)
First of all — some of you visiting the various YW websites six hours or so ago might have noticed that the servers were down. They’re fine now: the nice people at FutureQuest were updating us to a new version of PHP. (Seriously, if you’re looking for hosting, I recommend these folks. They are small enough to be immediately responsive and helpful but big enough to handle anything within reason. They are also splendidly proactive — they caught nasty people hacking the EuropeanCuisines.com site the other day and took it down immediately. My heroes.)
I’ve just spent a tiresome couple of days doing strictly technical stuff to the various YW-affiliated websites (upgrades, etc, mostly under-the-hood stuff that doesn’t show) and have had time to spend thinking about some changes I’ve wanted to make for a while. So here’s how things are going to go.
First of all, the Errantry Concordance. Maintaining this has increasingly become a pain, partly due to the essential (and kind of unavoidable) clunkiness of the wiki markup, partly due to changes in my local workflow, partly due to the difficulty of integrating MediaWiki with other apps.
So what I’m going to do over the course of November is move all the ErrantryWiki content into a wiki-styled WordPress installation. This will mean all exterior and interior links will get translated into standard URLs instead of the usual MediaWiki markup — not that this matters to anybody but me: it’s just simpler to work with. Some attempt will be made to keep page addresses the same, but I’m not fanatical about that (and doubt anyone else is). I could care less about that site’s SEO, and Google and the other search engines will digest the new sitemap .xml files soon enough. This will also render the site capable of handling its own core software upgrades, and will render the individual pages unspammable (something to which the present ErrantryWiki is sometimes vulnerable, especially as regards the “talk pages”). The overall effect will be to make this more like an encyclopedia / static resource and less like a wiki. I’ll kind of miss that aspect of it, but now that there are more effective and easy-to-use note-taking and -storing options like Evernote, I don’t really use the wiki as idea storage any more.
The most useful thing about this change of platform, though, is that it’ll make it possible to directly load/share YW meta that’s originally published here on Tumblr into the Concordance via IFTTT. I won’t have to worry about finding time to spend cutting & pasting: life’s too short, and I have enough on my plate right now as it is. Along the line I’ll devise ways to tag material exported from Tumblr as canonical, noncanonical, or under review, so that nobody gets confused. (At least any more confused as I am about any given issue.)
As I said, this won’t be an immediate thing, but by mid-November it should be all taken care of.
Which leads us to something else: the Young Wizards discussion forums.
They have been very quiet for quite a while. Not that this is unusual, between books. But when you get barely fifty or sixty page visits a week from only a few of a pool of ten or twenty people — outside of our friendly sysops — you start wondering why you’re making the ever-vigilant staff spend their valuable time keeping an eye on the place, and (additionally) why you’re spending your money on the storage space to keep those gigs and gigs of messages live for the very, very few people who look at them, let alone join the discussion forums and engage in, well, some discussion.
The online world has changed a lot since the Forums opened up in… 2005 or thereabouts? I can’t even remember any more. A lot of people do their discussing in/on less static platforms (like Tumblr, for one). There are those who say that the forum concept is over with. I’m not sure I’m willing to go quite that far.
And there’s this too. Tumblr, with all its virtues, is not all that great for long detailed discussions. For those of you who want to hash out YW-based issues with other interested parties, the vBulletin forum format really has tremendous strengths and advantages that are worth availing yourself of.
So here’s what’s going to happen. Over the next month or so the Forums are going to be tidied up, categories updated and shuffled, and the place generally improved as we get rid of some useless features and put in some new ones (especially things associated with the upcoming publication of Games Wizards Play). I encourage those of you who might not have thought about the Forums before to wander over there, kick the tires a little, do some searches and see what kinds of things people have been talking about for all this long while. See if it’s the kind of place you’d like to participate in.
After that, as 2015 sets in and the GWP release date starts drawing nearer, I’m going to give it a few months to see how the stats behave, and to give me some guidance on whether to keep the Forums alive or close them down. So that issue’s in all your hands now.
And one more thing, something new rather than old: the Games Wizards Play Tumblr. If you’re interested in the book, you want to be following / keeping an eye on this, because this is where I’m going to be rolling out something new. I was going to call it Fragment Friday, but some people are already doing that, so let’s call it Figment* Friday.
Every Friday between now and the release of the book on February 2, 2016, the GWP Tumblr will feature a fragment from the book. Might be a big piece, up to a thousand words… might be small, just a line or so. Might even be an outtake (but those will always be clearly labeled as such). The postings will always happen at 23:59 pm Irish time (normally 6:59 PM US Eastern or 3:59 PM US Pacific). I will not routinely be reblogging those postings at my own Tumblr unless the spirit moves me for some incomprehensible reason, so if you’re interested… follow the GWP Tumblr. (Or follow the GWP Twitter account, which will tweet a link to the mirror of the Figment Friday posts at the Games Wizards Play website blog.) On this side of things the tag will be “Figment Friday”: at Twitter it’ll be #FigmentFriday.
First figment / fragment goes up tonight, October 24th, at 11:59 PM Irish time. It’ll be the first thousand words or so of the first chapter of Games Wizards Play. So if you’re interested, or know someone who might be, please reblog this post and get the word out. 🙂
And one final note: next Friday, but only next Friday, there will be no figment, because we have something a bit more special. Next Friday, Halloween, sees the return of the YW 30-Day OTP Challenge series with post number 17: Spooning. And not one but two special guest stars…
*The word implies more than our normal/common usage as in “a figment of the imagination.” It means “a fantastic notion, invention, or fabrication”: from the Late Latin figmentum a fiction, from Latin fingere to shape.
Tom sat slumped at his desk, staring bleakly at his computer screen. Five and a half pages of what was supposed to be an eight page paper stared reproachfully back at him. An hour ago, five and a quarter pages had felt like an accomplishment. He ran his fingers through his too-long hair and made a noise of frustration. It would be a violation of my Oath to make the professor forget tomorrow’s deadline, he told himself sternly. …Today’s deadline, he amended, glancing at the clock, which is in three and a half hours. That’s…a page every hour, plus an extra forty-five minutes for citations and printing. He laid his forehead on the desk in defeat. Or three and a half hours to question my existence.
I hate finals.
“You and me both,” came a familiar voice, and Tom nearly upended his laptop in shock.
“Carl! I thought you weren’t going to—?”
“Change of plans.”
“But—”
“And by change of plans, I mean the sudden realization that messing with timeslides is decidedly not studying or working on any of the assignments I have due.” He flopped down on his bed and glared at the ceiling. “Even though I’d much rather go on errantry.”
Tom pushed away from his desk and swiveled to face his roommate, glad for the distraction. “Don’t let anyOne hear you say that,” he teased. “Haven’t we had that issue before?”
“I don’t care. In fact,” Carl rolled onto his side and grinned. “I’D MUCH RATHER GO ON ERRANTRY.” Silence, then—
“Shut the fuck up!” came a muffled voice from the other side of the wall. Tom burst out laughing, and even Carl chuckled.
“I suppose that’s our answer,” gasped Tom when he could breathe again. “Can’t use the Work to avoid the work.” He sighed, turning to face his desk again. “I need about a week between now and three hours from now.”
“Me, too.” Carl developed a thoughtful look. “Actually…”
Something in his tone made Tom look at him sharply. “You’re not going to suggest anything that will get us in trouble, are you?”
“No! Well, not technically. But think of what I’ve been working with for the past few months.” Silence, during which Tom definitely did not gape at Carl like he was the One Itself.
“Where do you want to spend the next week? More importantly, when would you like to spend the next week?” (from snowflurriedsky (aka littleskywatcher)
DD’s ten favorite lines from “Games Wizards Play”
10: “I’d prefer it to rain chocolate frosted donuts in my kitchen on Sunday mornings, but I don’t seem to be getting a lot of that.”
9: “Look, we’re all in The Sims.”
8: “But I’m on your side this time.”
7: “Wizardry is mean to me. I’m gonna tell.”
6: “Just don’t blame me if now she lives long enough to reproduce.”
5: “We’re using such different dictionaries.”
4: “It can probably be seen from space, but don’t let that bother you.”
3: “You may continue to stand in my presence.”
2: “That worked.”
1: "It made my day.”
spaceloveandrobots replied to your post “Pardon me as I slip back into hardcore fangirling over young wizards. …”
So apparently I need to read these books because my dash exploded.
YES. I mean only if you want to, but they are some of the most amazing, profound books I’ve ever read. And they go on sale a lot (especially around holidays) so the updated ebooks are super cheap.
(And they’re beautiful and you will cry all the tears.)
SittingOverHereDreaming 