the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes

James Wynn · 18 Jan 2011, 12:11 · from 2011-January.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: crushtv at gmail.com (James Wynn)
Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2011 06:11:46 -0600
Subject: (urth) the prime calcula/his citadel and other quotes
In-Reply-To: <004901cbb6f6$cc7327a0$7bd04a0c@rclackey>
References: <609292.90378.qm at web161801.mail.bf1.yahoo.com><00c201cbb68c$7229a680$b5cf4a0c@rclackey>	<4D34B7A5.3060607 at gmail.com>
	<004901cbb6f6$cc7327a0$7bd04a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4D358382.8020301 at gmail.com>

> Roy C. Lackey-
> If you mean only that Silk's head took the _place_ of Piaton's head in the
> image he was shown, then you are back to the other possibility that Silk saw
> his own head beside the head of Pas/Typhon and failed to notice any
> resemblance.

I realize it is easy to forget, but these books weren't written by Silk. 
They were written by Horn. While we can assume Horn is honestly writing 
about what he was told and saw, we cannot make assumptions about things 
being so based on NEGATIVE evidence...that is, we don't have any record 
of Silk saying, "Pas looks like me. So he must have not looked like Pas. 
Mint doesn't say 'You look like Pas' so therefore she never saw the 
resemblance."

>   Roy C. Lackey-
> Typhon's vanity and obsession with his face are a textual given. Mt. Typhon
> is proof. Having his own head cut off and attached to another man's body to
> preserve his face is about as obsessed as anyone can get, particularly if he
> had other options such as cloning available to him. The _Whorl_ was not
> carved in a day. Hammerstone said that chems were being stockpiled for ten
> years before they were put aboard the ship, so he had the time to grow a
> clone body if it could be done. Typhon's building and launch of the LSW is
> stated to have been his message to the universe. That's vanity.

I had always assumed that the purpose of the operation was that Typhon's 
own body was failing. If he did not have time to grow a new clone body.

> And carving his face on a mountain is all about vanity and has nothing to do
> with teaching his subjects to obey. Most of his subjects on the continent
> lived in or near Nessus, and he ruled the whole planet, not just the
> Commonwealth. The overwhelming majority of his subjects would never come
> anywhere near those mountains, never see that carved face.

What makes you think he didn't have billboards of himself everywhere? 
But it is the subjects close at hand who were the greatest threat.

u+16b9

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