not quite less ordinary

Huh, this afternoon I narrowly decided not to go on a spontaneous roadtrip with dkapell. The hanging around and gaming with laurion and asdr83 was certainly fun, but I was musing this evening that I ought to have taken the opportunity... at about which time I got a voicemail from new_man inquiring whether I wanted to go on a spontaneous roadtrip (by then it was of course several hours too late). Lesson: carpe diem.

Creatures of Light and Darkness

Just read Roger Zelazny's Creatures of Light and Darkness. It was good, but a little more disjoint than it could have been. The overall effect was a bundle of very interesting bits and pieces, which almost flowed smoothly into an excellent whole. I'd say it was a near thing at being a great book, and as it is it's a quite good book.

The thing that really interested me is how many evocative ideas he put into it. There are the Masters of Temporal Fugue (short-range time travel) who fight duels in paradoxical loops backwards and forwards; the Steel General, who when his whole body has been replaced piecemeal by robotics wears a ring of his original flesh; the non-diest, non-sectarian priest, who recites the Possibly Proper Death Litany*; one scrier reading the living entrails of another, with the latter rising up to argue the former's interpretation; half-human, half-machine oracles that can continue to analyze the future so long as they receive stimulation; the teleporter, who presumes an infinite universe must contain anything he can visualize, and may teleport anywhere he can envision. This last idea is only briefly touched upon here, but is essentially the basis for the Amber series. One wonders what he would have come up with if he'd gone down more of these paths...

In any case, I think I need to read more of Zelazny's early work. I had read the first half of Amber a while back, and enjoyed it, but it wasn't until I read the most excellent Lord of Light that I got really interested in him, and unfortunately the next thing I read was the later Amber quintet, which I found deeply unsatisfying.

*"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely..."

(no subject)

I was feeling manual and it was too wet for outdoor stuff, so I spent a while brushing up my ball juggling skills, with a diversion into some contact. Enjoyable as that was, it lead me to realize that my core juggling level has been almost static for 6-7 years at this point, after going from nothing to just barely seven in 2 years. Oddly, my occasional forays into devilsticking, contact, diabolo, and even clubs have continued to yield measurable improvements, but not balls. I may even have regressed slightly, because I dimly recall getting 15 with 8, and several runs of 30-35 with 7, whereas now the former is laughable and the a good run on the latter is perhaps 21. It's not so clear with the lower-numbers stuff, because I'm clearly rusty on some of the more obscure siteswaps etc. but e.g. my 5-ball Mills Mess is still halfway decent, and maybe even a bit better than before. Presumably what this suggests is that the physical demands of the big numbers are more than I can sustain with occasional practice, and that if I wanted to go up another notch I would need to devout some serious time to it.

It's odd, though, because I certainly have a much better overall arm strength and endurance than when I was 17, and my speed is probably about the same... I guess it's hyper-precision muscle memory, which unfortunately implies that focused training might well gain me little in the long-term, either in terms of numbers capability or in terms of overall dexterity. It somehow feels defeatist to give it up as wasted effort, but if I've reached the practical limit of personal betterment from it... well, at least I've still got 5 clubs to work on.