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Good luck, everyone. I’m rooting for you.

I have purchased my parents’ Christmas present* from Deiter’s Chocolates.

I am extremely hungry. Their present is in mortal danger.

My parents may get socks**.

*They get one box, but there’s a lot of stuff in there. That way it’s their fight over who gets what, not mine.

**Then they both get socks, and they don’t fight over them. Isn’t that the true spirit of Christmas? I’m taking one for the season, here.

East of the city, toward the rising moons, the soil thinned. The Church of Arya’s Favor stood among the mansions and palaces of Lower Falls. Not far southwest, the Clockwork Gods had left part of Meru unfinished. Down there the Thorium Mountains, the paving stones of the maker gods, gave way to ancient gears of white adamant, between which lay a thick fog. One could stand on the edge of rock and hill, and look down to twisting clockwork and bending springs, where the fog flowed like water and fell into a dark and sunless sea. If you stared down there long enough, you could see veins in the fog, like it was gum tissue receding from the gears.

But I had no intent in going in that direction. North the Thorium mountains stood above the Lower Falls, and east they petered out into hills and basins. Between those hills, the soil lay thin. I ran up and over a long foot of the mountains, down the other side into a narrow valley between tall, blocky hills, and started putting miles on my shoes. The road ran straight and smooth, unmarked with potholes or divots.

At first, by the ridge and not far into the hills, alluvial flows from the mountains had distributed some dirt among the valleys. Once past the first ridgeline, that stopped, and the great square blocks of thorium that made up the bedrock lay exposed. Thorium fluff and moss grew in the cracks between blocks, etching the rectangular crystals like mold on bread, but they hadn’t broken the stone up enough to turn it into dirt. At best they’d made small-grained gravel. Here and there the weeds had managed to take root in that, but growing in pure thorium burned them out before they made it to great size. Charred bracken, crisp grass, fried dandelions, and baked cactus crumbled beside the road, evidence that a fire had come through here recently and ignited the unstable thorium weeds. When they rotted and fell apart, they’d become more soil which would dilute the powerful stone. Layers of dirt would build up over time until the ground had a thick layer of loam, thick enough to support trees like in Lower Falls. Now I ran through dry, stark terrain where huge, crystalline stones lay exposed, glowing faintly blue or white but getting brighter as the sun set. I kept passing in and out of shadows, and felt like I was running between a hundred night times and twilights.

The problem with cool jetpacks is they’d burn your legs off.

To get around this, the jetpack thrusters have to be displaced from the back. That makes the jetpack cool in that flying is cool, but it doesn’t look as cool as the Rocketeer.

The Rocketeer holds the peak of jetpack aesthetics.

Marvel’s Falcon isn’t a jetpack user. He’s got wings. I understand that in some iterations his wing-pack has jets, but it’s a totally different aesthetic.

If they changed the theme song of Armageddon to Skyfall, that would be a really different movie.

XOR basically is boolean subtraction.

I wonder what an anthropologist from 12,000 AD would think of staples.

He deserved it.

SFC Celiz and MSG Plumlee clearly deserved it as well, but I hadn’t been tracking their statuses. SFC Cashe I had known about. The awardees performed acts of pure heroism and wartime valor. If an award like the MoH exists and is distributed honestly, they should get it. I’m glad they did.

The family of SFC Cashe has also behaved honorably in the face of what must have been immense frustration. They didn’t get drawn into politics or side issues; they stayed focused on the matter. The nature of the Army lends itself to bureaucracy, and SFC Cashe’s family did themselves and him proud by staying on target.

It’s worth pointing out how important things like the MoH are to bereaved families. Medals like this matter. They matter to people like me, watching from the silent majority, and the families who want recognition of what went into their loss. They don’t have Alwyn Cashe anymore, and they deserve some recognition that what happened, the events that took SFC from them, mattered, and his going was as important as it felt. It’s simple affirmation of sacrifice, and sacrifices like this earn it. People, the departed, the survivors, and the bereft, need that kind of affirmation.

This is a good thing, and credit to the Biden administration for getting it done.

Thank you everyone who bought the book or downloaded the ebook. Mara has been going strong, and it’s nice to see it move.

If you liked it, please leave a review. It gives me a little feedback, and lets me know my work isn’t disappearing into the void.

Mara is free on Kindle this weekend. Please buy it so I can quit my job.

I’m reading Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces, and it’s a slog. The ideas are good, but facts are getting shoved into theories. Doyle warned us about that.