Reflections on the Occasion of The Author's Third Rezday

Three Years.

I am I, because I am here...

I have made many things. Constantly, I am meeting little challenges to learn from.

I have heard songs I likely never would have heard otherwise.

I have met the love of my life, made dear friends and acquaintances I do not deserve, and have been blessed with only the most choice and select enemies.

I have the opportunity to fly, constantly.
I wear many faces.

I have helped waves of new residents find their footing. I have watched them come into their own, and in the words of two great transdimensional explorers, "be excellent, dude!"

I have tormented the mighty, pestered the annoying, and inflicted myself upon the masses.

I have whipped up whirlwinds of whimsy

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am having too much fun.

So Eat! Drink! Dance you fools! It is always about to end.

Facing the year to come, I forfeit my grumpy oldbie card. They send you one on your third rezday, you know. It entitles you to wail and gnash teeth about every little inconvenience. It gives you carteblanch to be bitter if someone else is having more fun than you, and even provides you an excuse, printed on the back in large, easy-to-read letters, reading "Back then, everything was more stable"

A little bit of Whimsy

To H.G. Wells

You are why we are here
With our steam engines, balloons, and improbable contraptions
Making the Present into Yesterday's Future

Happy Birthday, sir!

The Greatest Lie

As a culture, we have swallowed whole this idea that "The Dreamer Must Die." Look at the stories that litter our cultural heritage, and you see a common theme, wherein someone finds "A New Way" and is either killed for it, must sacrifice themselves mortally, or are too delicate for the world's cruelty.

These make great fiction, yes, but the trope is inherently dishonest. It does a disservice to those minds that burn bright to the last, to those who move aside for the next "New Way," and to the reader, who comes to associate genius with early demise.

Certainly there are many of those sparks that burn out all too soon, but looking at their lives, do not confuse genius and recklessness.

To be certain, everyone dies. However, that is not license to fetishise the dead dreamer to satisfy your need for an idol. Especially considering all the perfectly good, low mileage dreamers we have laying all about the place.

Improbably Large Aircraft or The Trouble with Cavorite

Cavorite is an amazing mineral, and provides us many freedoms when designing homes and airships. Not only does it allow lighter-then-air flight without the difficulties of attaining Helium, the hazards of Hydrogen, and the weight issues associated with the traditional Steam engine.

However, Cavorite comes with its own design problems.

If you look around our fair land, you will notice two obvious issues:

1 Cavorite is not readily damped. The lifting effect of cavorite is itself a damping effect, as it is "opaque" to gravity.

2 Cavorite purity is variable. Some veins, such as those in Moors and Stormhold have produced specimen so pure as to have rocketed skyward before being assayed, whereas Morgaine's cavorite is mostly in-matrix, and many of the largest boulders from the mountain can be lifted by a grown man.

The most common approach at this point is to build your structure or vehicle, find an appropriate quantity of Cavorite to bring the structure to a neutral or slightly positive bouyancy, and use rotors for maneuvering.

While this approach is the most elegant of current arrangements, it requires a fair amount of guesswork.

However, My thinking is, there must be a way around one or the other of these limitations.

We shall see.