Leibniz Clockwork

I’ve gone this far and not mentioned one of my all time favorite pieces of poetry.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in halls of stone,
Nine for Mortal Men, doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

~JRRT

I like that immensely.

First of course is the lore. That bit of lyricism as a part of T’s immense lore and worldbuilding adds depth that cannot be achieved any other way. The awesome thing about this poem is that the three elvish rings aren’t just interesting bits of imagery, but there’s story there. There’s history. The Nine for mortal men mean something. The short poem is thus a lot deeper, and when you read it with some knowledge of T’s work, there’s a lot of stuff and connections there.

Second is the simple scheme, even meter, and imagery itself. There’s no barrier to understanding in unnecessary complexity. The Dark Lord on his dark throne is a great picture, not just physically, big dude on evil looking throne, but emotionally. I get a feeling from that. Mordor where the Shadows lie: yeah, let’s party.

So another piece of fantastic poetry is one of my all-time favorites, one I couldn’t get out of my head when I went through Basic years ago. The Second Coming by Yeats.

The Second Coming is relatively famous for its apocalyptic imagery and setting. The first stanza is simply amazing. I tend to liken it to modern day Twitter, because the reasonable people don’t get much coverage and the absurd do. Some of this is reasonable itself. We don’t write news stories about planes that land safely. But it leaves one with a certain impression of the world that leads to despair.

I want to watch some movies or TV with flying cities.

A game I play is tying the hit counts on my AO3 page to historical meaning. Right now we’re at 1666, the second year of the Great Plague of London, which was the last major outbreak of plague, bubonic and pneumonic, on the way to the end of the epidemic in 1750. Roughly 100k people died in London over two years, which is ghastly and tiny compared to how many people died of it earlier. Plague outbreaks would continue for almost another century, and in the modern day a few people die of it every year. Some epidemic pathologists think there may be a cell in the American Southwest, New Mexico, Arizona, possibly Utah, Nevada, and Colorado, and we do have a few fatalities most years.

Darkness by Lord Byron is metal af.

Updates will resume Sunday, July 21st.

Congratulations, US Women. Well done.

If the price of leadership is endless attempts to tear you down, it’s one I understand some people being unwiling to pay. But I admire those who do. Utmost respect to the women who paid it in France, and those who came reaching for the same heights. Congratulations to all competitors.

I think the real purpose of editing is staring at the manuscript after it’s away and instantly realizing all the things I could improve. Things I never saw before after months/years of poring over the text are brutally obvious now.