The Sorcerer's House Questions (Major Spoilers)

Gwern Branwen · 23 Mar 2010, 13:21 · from 2010-March.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:21:54 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Sorcerer's House Questions (*Major Spoilers*)
In-Reply-To: <cbf55b101003230601q4e16f289qbd590f7295bd9db7 at mail.gmail.com>
References: <44fb53d11003191442y48191c3ataaac84d798b8b983 at mail.gmail.com> 
	<b12d82081003222138q4670afa3m4f2b34e187c18198 at mail.gmail.com> 
	<cbf55b101003230601q4e16f289qbd590f7295bd9db7 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <cbf55b101003230621n32bfc8f2pd877bcd6a8946fd6 at mail.gmail.com>

John C. Wright: http://johncwright.livejournal.com/322189.html

"Between the time I wrote the original post at 4.00 AM and now at
10.00, I have reached page 33. Thoughts so far: Mistrust whatever the
letter-writer says when he writes to his brother, whom he is asking
for money. When the ex-con is reading Thucydides, suspect a change of
personality or identity, as often happens in a Wolfe book. When the
ex-con finds a ring inside a fish, he takes it as a sign of good
fortune, but the Polycrates myth (if I remember it correctly) is that
a king throws a ring into the sea to avert the jealousy of the gods;
and finding the ring inside a fisherman's catch meant that the god
rejected the sacrifice: in other words, it is an prodigy among ill
omens. "

Side note; this is a hilarious D&D story:
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/323619.html
Also funny; how Wright seems to bring politics into everything, eg.
http://johncwright.livejournal.com/324494.html (I didn't sympathize
with the Mars preservers in Robinson's _Blue Mars_, but that didn't
stop me from enjoying it.)

-- 
gwern

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net