The amount of calories burned and how tired swimming makes me feel are completely disproportionate.
Proposition HH
I was selected for some market research regarding Proposition HH.
Colorado has a Tax Payer’s Bill of Rights, which in practice means tax increases have to pass a referendum. If Colorado collects more money than a set threshold, the state must return this to Coloradoans. The threshold is a matter of law. Most years, we get a refund.
Proposition HH increases refunds this year but increases the threshold for next year, meaning this year people making less than 100k get a bigger refund and after that, refunds will be smaller. The retained money will be earmarked for schools. There is also a rebate on property taxes. For me, a renter making less than 100k, I’ll get a bigger refund this tax year (so next calendar year) and lower refunds every year after with no gain from reduced property taxes.
This is very poorly explained, and the market research consisted of extremely misleading factoids. They asked questions like, ‘Would hearing that big business and millionaires oppose Proposition HH make you more or less likely to vote for it?’ Nothing ever really talked about what HH did. I had to do a lot of digging to get an explanation, and the writeup of ballot language didn’t clearly explain the bill at all. The research survey left me feeling like someone was trying to manipulate me and not doing a subtle job of it.
What’s weird is that I’m not necessarily against HH. It’s a tax hike, and sometimes taxes go up. That’s life. But I really didn’t like feeling like someone was trying to swindle me.
Things I Relearned Today
6 amps is a lot of current.
Concern
I just had a moment of shock at how long I’ve been in my program. And I am not done, nor at the edge.
Gorat’s Fury
Practicing an into:
Her words came from darkness. “We should kill him.”
Light came, and black-robed Luthia flopped gracelessly into an overstuffed chair. She remembered her poise almost immediately. Stretching her back and sitting up straight, she crossed her legs with her knees pointed away from him and I. She had enough energy to smooth her dress, but done, she sank again. Her back curled. Her shoulders were more slumped than back.
“Not yet. He’s one of Gorat’s Furies. Killing him would be a production, and you always ignore things like difficulty. Rest.”
“I could do it right now,” she said.
The he replied, “I’m not sure of that.”
He was Orweil. His hair was long and wild, his shirt open to the sternum, the swell of his pecs visible. He had big lips and soft eyes. A red scar started on the crest of his forehead and spread out, emerging from his hair at the collar. He looked like some plant had taken root on his skull. Orweil had been hit by lightning.
I was a little fuzzy. A thale had tried to kill me. That would do it.
“How’s your boyfriend?” asked Orweil.
“He ran off. Disappeared,” Luthia answered.
“So sorry.”
“I have the worst luck with men.” Luthia sighed.
Orweil said nothing. He went beyond not saying anything to make an active, statement of silence, leaning forward, flexing his chest, turning to face her three-quarters.
“I still think we should kill him,” said Luthia. “He’s weak.”
“You are thinking of mortals,” said Orweil. He did that little headshake some men do when they’re correcting a woman. “Very democratic of you. A knife in the dark, and they all die. This is a Fury. A simple knife won’t–”
She cut him off. “Yes, I know that.”
“I’ve never understood that about you. You go out of your way to find people who aren’t mortal then act surprised when they require special care. This is a Fury. The killing of him will be a great work.”
She said, “You do understand why, don’t you?”
He flounced. “Fine. Do it. Stab him as Van did. Cut his throat. Good luck.”
Luthia hissed, and I said, “Supplicant is encouraged to try.”
Their quarrel froze. Luthia’s eyes went wide as bucklers. Soft skin turned ashen. Orweil slouched on a table.
I sat up, torso vertical with no leg motion, pivoted on the palms of my hands and butt, and put my feet down. The floor felt like unpolished stone, something rough and grainy, maybe granite. It felt cold. The thale had punched me out of my shoes.
Luthia couldn’t close her mouth. Her jaw hung flacid.
“A Fury,” Orweil said to her. “You’ve seen it before, but then it was against someone else. See the Fury wrapped in your power. See the ties of the binding.”
I stood up. Now that I noticed it, there was sorcery on me. I pulled it off like cobwebs. “Who are you?” I asked Orweil.
“I am Orweil. And I know you, Fury. I know of you, which for your kind is close enough. Why are you here? Who’s getting the blessings of Gorat?”
Luthia awoke from her shock and looked at him, for the first, maybe only time, really impressed.
“The Baron’s killer,” I replied. “I was his guardian angel.”
“Bit late, aren’t you?” asked Luthia.
“No, I’m right on time. Gorat’s angels protect through retribution. I will build Him a monument of wrath, and no one will ever harm His favored ones again. You. Who are you?”
Orweil said nothing, but Luthia looked worried. “I am Luthia. I’m a princess of Kageran. You have a problem. Deterrence only works if the other party is thinking ahead. What about rogue assassin, a fanatic, or a mad cow? They won’t care for deterrence.”
I shrugged. “Not my concern. What’s a mortal anyway? The next one will think twice.”
“But,” argued Luthia again. “You don’t have to worry now. The assassin is dead.”
“One is,” I agreed. “But as you said, that’s not enough. That won’t deter anyone willing to die. I must find and kill his family, his lovers, his city, and his nation.”
Luthia must be one of those people who think cynicism is a virtue. She was not prepared for devotion. Silvered nails tick-ticked on wood hidden in uphosltery. She said nothing and seemed to hardly breathe.
Orweil lost slivers of his affected cool. He sat back then forward, pressed the table with his bare hands, then picked them up to steeple his fingers. He looked at me through them.
“That would seem to imply a certain amount of difficulty for those uninvolved,” said Orweil.
“Once,” I said.
Luthia turned away and looked outside. Mist shrouded the windows lace curtains outside. Through the mist, shadows walked among the trees in the hilghlands.
Character
An aristocrat who thinks a fall can’t happen to him.
Someone really certain of their place in the world.
Facts
DnD: Honor Among Thieves was a better and more faithful adaption than either LotR: Rings of Power or Wheel of Time.
Scifi Intro
Regula was a small main sequence star, barely two thirds the mass of the Sun. She had three planets from birth and captured two more.
The innermost, Andar, orbitted Regulus at a period of three days. Andar was a gas giant captured millions of years ago and orbitted almost perpendicular to the solar plane. From Aschites, it seemed to go up and down, and so massive was it that Regula oscillated against it. Their dance was called the Divine Waltz.
Morian, the Dawn Star, orbitted far inside Regulus’s habitable zone. Tidally locked to the Regulus, Andar gave it a bit of a wobble so the small rockball continuously juttered around like the eyeball of a frightened giant.
Theo, the Wanderer, was the outermost of Regula’s true-born children. An icy giant of methane and water, it orbitted at the edge of space, and outside it, great Holon, the captured brown dwarf, ranged in what could be considered space. Holon glowed with its own light, a faint brown and blue, and lit up with flashes when comets fell into its clouds. It was one tenth the size of Regula, larger than everything else in the system combined, and hid in the solar halo with the ice clouds and dust.
Aschites, middle son of Regula, orbitted across the habitable zone. It was an old world in an old, cold system. Soon after forming it had eaten its moon, and their collision threw it into a wide, eccentric orbit. Full of heavy metals and radioactive elements, Aschites took nearly a billion years to form a crust. It took another billion to collect an atmostphere. Life had already appeared by then.
Six billion years after Anschites’s impact with its forgotten moon and four billion years before Regula would catch Andar from his wandering, the first two-celled organism arose. One hundred million years passed. Two-celled life exploded in all directions, formed shells and tails, scilia, spines, ridges, and spores. Within three million years, Regula’s eyes appeared: billion-celled organisms that floated like jellyfish across the deep seas. A geological eye-blink later, something like a worm appeared. Another blink, and something bigger ate the worms. Soon fish swam. The seas turned green with plants.
Aschites’s hot and raging core formed terrain wildly unlike Earth. With fewer planets to clear the system of comets and no moon to shelter it, Aschites took asteroid impacts constantly. The crust was less firm, and the mantle more fluid. The seas formed pits fifty miles deep and made mountains that rose above the atmosphere. The deeper parts of the sea were full of geysers, and even in the black, lightness abysses, things crawled, climbed, and swam.
Life did not so much venture out of the water as it was pushed. So many things were swimming, hunting, chasing, and living in the oceans that creatures infested the beaches just to get away. From there they crawled upwards. The air was hot and thick, and seven ice comets struck Aschites in less than a year, each more than 1% of the planet’s mass. The air turned to water vapor and fog. Their impacts pushed Aschites close to the Regula. Fog turned to steam and boiled the land clean. The ocean surface cooked, but life endured and grew old in the dark, cool places far beneath the waves.
Finally, Regula caught Andar, and his coming perturbed Aschites to a new, further orbit. The atmosphere cooled. Life climbed out of the depths again and found the soil impregnated with nitrogen fixing microbes. They had gone down to escape the heat. The gentle cooling acted like releasing a brake, and Aschites turned green. Within a thousand years, its surface was covered in trees. The forest grew old. Mushrooms came to take the dead, small creatures lived around the roots, and mammals appeared high on the slopes of the giant mountains.
Regula burned slowly. She was less than ten billion years old when the first man climbed to his feet and watched a crystal space-ship fly away. That memory was lost like Aschites’s moon, and the man turned to surviving. The sky was blue, the sun was green, and the seas were dark.
Now Ashites had hot, wet summers and cold, dry winters. Its air was thick, and the atmosphere was tall. Nitrogen rich comets had seeded the atmosphere far above its stability level, and within thirty million years, a short nap in Regula’s life, Aschites’s atmosphere would boil away, down to the level gravity could hold it. But life could do much in thirty million years, and on the banks of a river, older than names, a man and a woman played with sticks until they discovered fire.
Two million years later, Gerard Aswego got his ass beat for stealing bread.
Fantasy
I often wonder if there’s any good in writing fiction, if by doing so in some way the world is made slightly better.
Is the world made better by simple joy? Put like that, the answer seems like it should be yes.
TiH: Outtakes
“What should we do with him?”
“Let’s give him a bunch of firedust and teach him Moonshadow Fist.”
There was a pause. “Why would we possibly do that?”
“I dunno. See what happens.”
“That is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
#
Master Feng woke me up. “Want to take a bunch of firedust and learn forbidden martial arts?”
What kind of stupid question was that?
“Yes!” I said obviously.
#
“This is Moonshadow Fist. I’ve decided to teach you this because it’s highly linear and effective, but it does tend to warp the mind toward violence and confrontation.”
“Got it. I’m with you.”
“Good,” he said and attacked me.
Our initial exchange pulled my guard down, and he swung a wild, open palm behind him while blocking both my hands with one of his. His finges trapped me, and I could not dodge. Mid-strike his hand turned gold and began to burn, and when he hit me, open palm to the forhead, he shouted, “Ko!”
It means Hand of Knowledge in an old and blasphemous tongue of Men.