Rose Red and Snow White

Once upon a time there lived a widow with her two daughters.

One daughter was named Snow White and the other was Rose Red.

One night, in the coldest part of winter, there was a knock on the family's door. It was a bear. "Let me in. It is cold out and your home looks warm," the bear said.

The widow and her daughters let the bear come in and lay by the fire. Night after night, the bear returned.

Finally spring came and the bear stopped coming every night. He said he had treasure to protect since the than had softened the ground.

The widow and her daughters said a sad farewell to the bear. Now that the weather was warmer, Rose Red and Snow White spent hours roaming the countryside.

One day, Snow White and Rose Red found a small man with a long beard. His beard was stuck beneath a tree which he had just chopped down. "My beard! My beard!" he called out. "Someone help me!" "Here, this should do the trick," Snow White said. She pulled a pair of scissors out of her day basket and snipped the end of the man's beard, freeing (him) from the tree.

"Oh, my beard! My beard!" the small man cried. "You evil girls, look what you have done to my beautiful beard!" He scooped up a bag full of jingling and jangling treasure and ran off.

The second time the girls met the small, mean man, they found him caught in his own fishing line. After failing to untangle the hook from his beard, Snow White once again got out her scissors and snipped the beard.

"Oh, my beard! My beard!" the small man cried. "You evil girls, look what you have done to my beautiful beard!" He scooped up a bag full of jingling and jangling treasure and ran off.

The third time the girls met the small, mean man, he was being carried off by an eagle. Snow White and Rose Red each grabbed one of the man's legs and pulled him the the eagle's talons.

The man's coat was ripped and torn from the eagle. "You evil girls, look what you have done to my beautiful coat!" He scooped up a bag full of jingling and jangling treasure and ran off.

The fourth time the girls met the little man, his boot was stuck in the rocks of a steep hill. The girls tugged and pulled and finally freed the man from the rocks by pulling his foot out of his boot.

Just then, the bear from the winter ran down the hill and hit the small man in the head with his paw.

The small man fell down dead and, free of the small man's curse, the bear turned in a prince.

The prince invited Snow White, Rose Red, and their mother to live with him at his castle. They lived together happily ever after.

Political and Philosophical Questions

Some interesting questions that have really been changing the way I think about politics lately:

Are poor people to blame for their monetary situation?
Are rich people to blame for their monetary situation?
If different reactions, why?

Is it the government's job to bail out large companies?
Is it the government's job to bail out individuals?
If different reactions, why?

What counts as a bailout? (Social Security? Medicaid? Pro-business regulations and subsidies?)

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? "A healthy society involves the use of no coercive force."

(For following examples, "freedoms" or "rights" are assumed to stop where another person's begins.)
Coercive force applied to freedom of speech is acceptable/unacceptable. When one vs the other? (For instance, is it one person's job to PAY for another person to have the ability to speak freely).
Coercive force applied to freedom of movement is acceptable/unacceptable. When one vs the other? (For instance, is it one person's job to PAY for another person to have the ability to move freely).
Coercive force applied to freedom of property (the right to claim ownership of something) is acceptable/unacceptable. When one vs the other? (For instance, is it ok to take money? What about land or a house? A car? Who has the right to take money/land/a car?).

Who has the right to use coercive force? (In most places, the reality is that it is more or less the monopoly of the government.)

What is a government? (should be vs actually is)
Who is part of a government? (should be vs actually is)
Who controls a government? (should control vs actually controls)

Ok, so I have some replies to these things, but I don't want to just post them here. I want some people to actually think about these questions. It'd be AWESOME if someone typed up their thoughts, but so long as some people read this and kind of think about their ideas, that's good.

Something I know I care about is having a consistent approach to the world. I try not to overdo it - I think trying too hard to be conscientiously consistent can lead to indecisiveness of a ridiculous extent. But I think these questions made me think about things from a slightly different perspective, and reevaluate how consistent my beliefs actually were.

Looking forward to some interesting discussions with whoever reads this!

Rapunzel

I've been drawing cartoons for the small children at work. And they've been taking them home, and I haven't thought to take any photos of the drawings before they're vanished into the ether of small-child-dom. Here's one done in the same style, but using marker instead of crayon. I did it during breakfast! It was lots of fun.

At the end, the prince isn't dead, just blind and being cried on by Rapunzel. Rapunzel's tears cure his blindness and they live happily ever after. I was lazy and didn't draw a seventh "happily ever after" panel.

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 8, Day 9, and Day 10 part 1

DAY 8:
    Pieder's eighteenth birthday was less than a week away. He was ruminating on whether he could convince the Witch to attend the small celebration at his parents' cottage when an unusual sound reached his ears. He was on an offshoot of the main road through this part of the East Woods, heading back to the Witch's home after his monthly weekend stay at his parents' home. Footsteps (for the was the sound he had heard) were rare on this path. Pieder was the only person who frequented this small side trail, though wild creatures used it as well which kept it passable.
    Pieder had spent hours with the Witch learning person combat, but the best approach to dealing with robbers and other unsavory types was avoidance. Pieder crept off the path as quietly as he was able and hid behind a broad tree trunk. He used a spell, one of many he had learned in his apprenticeship to the Witch, which created dozens on magically conjured insects as eyes and ears, fogging the air with what appeared to be perfectly natural gnats, flies, and moths. Using his temporarily expanded senses, Pieder saw a human leading a bizarre creature that was as much magic as it was flesh. Though Pieder had never seen one before in the remote fastness of the Wood, he had seen pictures in the many books owned by the Witch and had been told of their use, creation, and care by his mistress.
    It was called a Glub and was favored by lone travelers throughout Iskandar. Glubs could navigate on their own from properly ensorcelled maps, could serve as shelter during the night, could travel long distances with no nourishment besides water and sunlight, could carry quite a bit and pull a lot more, could be ridden on roads and led through narrow paths, were ferocious in defending their owner without being overly zealous as guards. They looked rather like oversized beetles with the wings removed and clear wing covers. Instead of wings, they had a reclined seat where the rider could sit and observe the world, possibly while sleeping or reading. The wing covers could be lifted, which narrowed the whole body and allowed for travel through dense forest. The wing covers could also be flattened, which permitted the whole Glub to float rather like a raft. It would not last in rapids or the open ocean, but for crossing a ford made otherwise impassable by recent heavy rain it was perfect.

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 6 part 2, Day 7

    "You can read my mind?" Pieder gasped, barely audibly, and almost dropped the old woman into the hot pool of water before she was even undressed.
    "Careful!" she exclaimed. Then she loosened Pieder's grip on her and took off her night robe with no trace of inhibition or modesty. Pieder knew he ought to blush, but couldn't muster enough emotion to do so.
    "Go, prepare breakfast," the Witch ordered. "And you can read my mind as much as I can read yours. Loud and externally directed thoughts -- the sorts of things you would use words to say or noises to express -- can be heard by both of us as though they were in our own heads. Shoo! I can instruct you from anywhere within this house without trouble."
    Pieder obeyed.
    Days flew by, and as the anxiety potion wore off Pieder found himself capable of living with the Witch without fear of his own accord. Both the Witch and Pieder grew so used to living on the periphery of each others thoughts that as the communication potion faded they agreed to try a spell to bind their minds together for a longer time. The Witch spent weeks constructing potions and steams, salves and bizarre machines. By the time she was prepared to carry out her spell, she and Pieder had been without any direct communication besides writing for more than a week. Writing was very difficult for the Witch to do unassisted, and while she had various magical contraptions to aid her, her favored way of writing was to dictate her words to Pieder. It was almost a year after Pieder had first arrived to live with the Witch, and he had grown fond of his mistress in a strange way, fearing her and loving her both to some extent, but mostly just fascinated utterly by her magic and her wisdom.

DAY 7
    Iris watched the Magician as he worked the crowd. She hated these people as much as she loved these parties. Some of the younger guests were interesting, and a few were almost her friends. As much friends as an entertainer and an audience member could be. The Magician insisted that the barriers to friendship that Iris saw were all in her head. But every time Iris watch him work a room, oozing from one patron to the next, it reinforced her suspicion that all relationships formed as part of her job were ultimately fake.
    The party was lavishly decorated. Flowers adorned the tables, set in vases of crystal and living wood cleverly intertwined by the best artificers Iskandar had to offer. Two walls, granite perhaps, were covered by thin sheets of water, fountains cleverly made by fanning water out from the system of veins pumping warm (or cool, depending on the season) water through the mansion. At the foot of the fountain was a trough which collected the water once more. Iridescent lights flickered behind the water, the granite covered in potions and pastes created by apothecaries from far and wide. The Magician had organized and maintained much of the magic on display. That meant that Iris knew more than she would like about many elements of the decoration. The fountains that arched water across wide swaths of the ballroom were Iris' to care for. While they glittered in the light of thousands of carefully ensorcelled fireflies and floating globes of many tinted witch light, their beauty constantly reminded Iris that she was here to do a job and not to enjoy herself.
    Unbeknownst to her, many in the crowd felt similarly. They were there to make an appearance, to cement a business relationship, to impress a superior. As a ritzy social affair it was work of one kind or another for most of the attendees. But Iris was fifteen and the Magician, her uncle, mentor, and employer, had never thought to inform her of the nature of the engagements they spent much of their lives facilitating.
    In addition to caring for the scenery, from the fireflies to the fountains to the flowers, Iris was being paid to work the crowd. She was a paid guest, a party goer who set the mood and identified the guests who were not enjoying themselves. She then found a way to include the discordant notes in the melody (the unhappy guests in the lighthearted party) more completely in the appropriate mood. 
    At fifteen, Iris had gotten her full height but retained a nymphish lack of curves. Through she fit into gowns designed with an adult's height in mind, gowns made for her had to be altered after their creation in order to fit her flat chest and slender hips without bunching.
    Since most clothing, especially the more expensive types, were grown, the were not supposed to have seams except as decorative embellishments. Seams were a sign of low class more stark than an unoriginal design. Iris was learning how to reshape her clothes before they were grown, but her current outfit had had to be taken in by a seamstress. She had been skilled, using the seams for art as much as functionality. But even if others were impressed by the clever craftsmanship of her clothing (and many guests at the event had been) Iris felt self conscious.
    Her outfit was a jumpsuit belted tightly about the waist. It had loose legs and sleeves so full that they could almost be wings. The neck was loose about the throat, gathering in layers above Iris' meager breasts. The closure to the jumpsuit was done with tiny golden buttons, and it wound from the left side of her neck, diagonally across her back to her right hip, then spiraled around her right thigh and ended just above her knee. The whole piece was sheer and white with tiny pearls formed within the weave and weft of the fabric. Beneath the jumpsuit, Iris wore a leotard of deep, iridescent blue cut almost severely and with long tight fitting sleeves.

4,604 words out of 50,000 total

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 6

    The change in scents almost kept him from falling asleep, but eventually he drifted off into a deep dreamless slumber. While Pieder slept, the Witch crept through the house with a glass vial and something small and squishy inside of it. She wiped a spot behind Pieder's left ear with alcohol, then carefully poured the soft, squishy substance onto the freshly cleaned piece of skin. The squishy thing writhed and wriggled, then settled and grew flabbier and flabbier as its fluids flowed into Pieder's blood. It was a sort of leech, tiny and with the single purpose of placing the Witch's potions into Pieder's body. By the time Pieder awoke, it would have fallen off and be nothing more than a desiccated flake of soon to be dust by his head. Gross perhaps, but harmless and not the sort of thing that would induce panic in any but the most paranoid. Anyone who came even half willingly to live with the Witch could hardly be called paranoid.
   
    Pieder awoke with sunlight streaming into his eyes from a skylight placed slightly to the east of directly overhead. He blinked several times, desperately wanting to roll over and hide in his surprisingly comfy cot, but impelled by some inexplicable force to rise and dress. He made his way through the house uncertainly, feeling the slightest bit grimy in comparison to the startlingly clean surfaces surrounding him.
    "Hello," a warm alto voice greeted him when he stood cautiously at the door to what he was bizarrely certain was the Witch's sleeping chamber.
    "Hello?" Pieder tried to say, but only managed to whisper faintly.
    "I'm not actually speaking," the voice said, it's tone a smile.
    Pieder stood frozen, his eyes glassed over in terror.
    "Yes, I am the Witch of the Wood. And this is a small taste of the magic you will encounter during your stay with me. Now walk through the door and help me out of my bed, boy."
    Pieder felt a tug on his arm and gentle push against the small of his back. He stumbled forward, then found his feet carrying him through the doorway and into the tall yet oddly cozy room with the Witch's grand bed against one wall. A desk sat against the opposite wall with a wooden chair that looked grown rather than carved. Between them was the doorway in which he stood and a doorway opposite him which led to a shadowy chamber smelling strongly of soap and fresh hot water.
    "You have questions," the voice (the Witch, Pieder supposed) stated. "Ask them. And help me get to my morning bath."
    Pieder was bubbling with questions, but fear kept them at bay. Except, suddenly his fear felt more distant and the questions crept to the forefront of his mind. This made him more anxious than anything else.
    "What have you done to me?" he asked somewhat petulantly.
    "Made you my apprentice," the Witch answered cryptically. "Put your hands under my arms and lift." The Witch reached out to him with her stubbed fingers and a grimace of faint pain. Perhaps her joints ached, or she simply disliked waking.
    Pieder obeyed her despite his many misgivings. He was not certain if he was under a spell to obey or if he was actually helping her of his own accord. He wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to trust his instincts again. He felt betrayed by his parents, by his body, by his mind, by this terrifying creature that he was now helping out of bed and into a bathing chamber that sank into the lower part of the shell house.
    "Ah, that is quite a mouthful," the Witch sighed. "Yes, of course you can trust yourself. And no one has betrayed you. Your emotions are being toyed with a bit right now, it is true, and I cannot help it directly. Last night I cast a spell of sorts; gave you a potion that would soothe your fears and a different potion that would allow us to communicate more effectively than gestures. Both will wear off eventually. Your ability to feel fear and anxiety fully will return within the next day or so. The other I do not know a time frame on, as I have never used it before and it is a potion of my own creation so no one else has used it either."

3,612 words out of 50,000 total

Book Club: Big Sleep

Phillip Marlowe

Carmen Sternwood -- pulls wings off flies

Vivian - Mrs. Regan -- calculating, smart

Objectivity, distance as detective model

Maid, cleaning up rich people's lives, tidy morally? maybe not… observer being complicit in the crime… what is his motivation to do this job? doesn't enjoy it much, not getting highly compensated. is marlowe good or bad? Ambivalent?

Vivian cares a lot about… something? Carmen is "naked" always, maybe? Isn't suited for the world she lives in.

Brody and Eddie Mars we've met once each… each is a themed color,

"Doghouse Riley": a reference to something? made up name. "dog house" as in "jail" and "riley" as in "irish", "justice/cops". Repetition. Reassuring himself, defying other people's labels.

Carmen as in the opera. Tragic figure. Wholly objectified. Insane. Unpredictable. Body and emotions, but no brain.

Vivian as in… ? Defined by her missing husband. "Mrs. Regan." Intentional? Manipulative. Brains, veiled emotions. Mannish? Emulating men?

Agnes… silver claws. Blonde, relies on Brody entirely, animal-like in viciousness and loyalty. Not big in brains. Almost Brody's pet. Outraged and offended.

Women are very flat. Women=sexuality=shallow? None of them are old, only one them is actively helpful and she only exists for one page (28).

After the break is a synopsis of what we've read so far. If you're interested in reading or... something, then don't read it! Spoilers and all that.

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 3, part 2

    There was a stone path through the flowers and herbs and vegetables growing in profusion near the road. The path led to a  strange cottage that appeared to be a greatly oversized snail shell half buried in the ground. There was a roughly circular hole for the door, sealed by a thick leather curtain. Holes shimmered along the top of each whorl, quartz windows reflecting sunlight filtered through the tall trees of the forest.
    The Witch led Pieder along the path and into her strange home. He spent the day following her about and learning the tasks he must do. Most were familiar things, like washing the dishes and sweeping the floor. But getting the water consisted of lifting a lever, since the water ran through veins all over the house and could be poured into sinks and buckets in several rooms. One chamber, for the rooms were too open and strangely shaped for Pieder to think of them as boring everyday rooms,  seemed to be an indoor outhouse, which struck Pieder as intensely disgusting. Oddly, it had almost no odor despite being a place of filth. Another seemed to be reserved for cooking. The strangely snail-like house had a root cellar of sorts, indoor plumbing, and a minimal amount of electricity to run various contraptions about the house. One of the chief contraptions thus run seemed to both provide a way from rapidly drying clothes and heating the whole dwelling.
    There was a chamber, almost a hallway between the outhouse chamber and the front room chamber, that had a cot set to one side and a small dresser with two drawers carefully cleaned and empty. It appeared to be his bedchamber. He placed his small bag on the cot and glanced at the Witch, who was paused for him. She gestured for him to place the items in his bad into the dresser. He removed a single change of clothes, a toothbrush, and a book of fairy stories his parents had given him for his tenth birthday. He also had mittens, a jacket, a pair of longjohns, and a wool hat. All of this he was wearing at the moment over and under the rest of his clothing, and he was sweating heavily. He removed everything except his shirt, pants, and longjohns and carefully folded it away in what he assumed must now be his dresser. He had never had his own dresser before. It was strangely pleasant.
    The first night he spent in the Witch's abode was terrifying. Her home smelled faintly of lavender, probably propagated by the various sachets and sprays of lavender that hung about the house. Peider's home, or rather his parents' and sisters' home now that he no longer lived there, smelled of woodsmoke and various cooked foods and drying vegetables.

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 3, part 1

    Pieder's tossing and turning slowly stilled, and after almost half an hour the string slipped back out of his nose. It lay quiescent on his chest, just a string and nothing more. Laurinda shivered, horrified and scared. The old woman took a scrap of cloth from a pocket and used it to lift the string. As soon as the cloth touched it, an eerie melody began to fill the silent cottage. The old woman nodded and turned to the couple with a faint smile on her hideous face.
    She placed the string and cloth back into one of her pockets, then pantomimed money dropping from one hand into the other. The parents glanced at each other uncertainly.
    "You want payment?" Douglas asked.
    The old woman nodded.
    "We don't have much money," Douglas said.
    The old woman waved a hand dismissively.
    "You want something else?"
    The old woman nodded. She pointed a stubbed finger at the boy.
    "Yes we want you to heal him," Douglas said, perplexed. He had thought this was clear already from the way the old woman has been checking the boy over.
    The old woman frowned and pantomimed money once more, then pointed to the boy.
    "You want... Pieder as payment?" Laurinda gasped.

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 2, part 2

    The old woman nodded once more, then gently set the string down onto the sleeping boy. It writhed to an uncanny life, and Laurinda screeched in horror. The witch put up a silencing hand, and Douglas caught Laurinda in his arms before she could rush to her son's side. "Hush, you'll wake the girls," he mumured.
    "Mama? What's wrong?" a small voice asked, still filled with sleep.
    Lucy, seven years old and still half asleep, knelt beside the bannister of the cottage's loft. She held the hand of four year old Rosalind tightly enough that Rosalind whined and tried to pull away.
    "Everything's fine, girls," Douglas said firmly.
    "Mama?" Lucy repeated uncertainly.
    "Yes, everything's fine. Go back to bed. It's late," Laurinda murmured, entranced by the writhing string making it's way towards her beloved boy's nostrils. She gasped and flinched when the string wormed its way up his nose and slipped out of view into Pieder's insides. Lucy and Rosalind stared unabashedly and the old woman in their home, but obeyed their parents and went back to lay in bed. They whispered together, Lucy shushing Rosalind and providing the comfort that her parents were too terrified to offer.
1,700 words out of 50,000 total.

NaNoWriMo 2011, Day 1 and Day 2

    Pieder lived in a forest with his mother, Laurinda, and his father, Douglas, and his two younger sisters, Lucy and Rosalind. His father's father's father had first built the small stone house that they inhabited, and his grandfather had expanded it with logs. Pieder's father had spent every spring since his first child was born replacing the logs with stone fit together just so, so as to prevent wind from slipping through any cracks. Pieder was really the second child in the family, but his older brother Frederick had died of the pox when Pieder was five and Frederick was eight. It had been a devastating blow to Pieder's parents, and they had never been the same since. Pieder dimly recalled when the house was a warm and welcoming place, but his younger sisters had no such recollections and occasionally Pieder felt sorry for them. He would have spent more time feeling sorry for them, but he spent most of his life incredibly busy. There was bark to strip off of the logs his father cut, and fur to clean and the house to be swept and tools to be mended. All the small chores of the house besides knitting and spinning and weaving and churning butter were delegated to Pieder. He didn't mind too much, except that he longed to have some time to spend wandering the secret paths of the forest and encountering witches and wizards and gnomes and the like. Fairy stories told by Laurinda had taken a fierce hold upon the boy, and nothing Douglas said could shake Pieder's certainty that some secret magic lay just beneath the surface of his entire life.
    Pieder grew fairly peacfully to be eleven years old, with a seven and four year old sister to plague him any time they were free and he was working (which happened far too often for Pieder's taste). But shortly after his birthday, on the eve of Midsummer's Day, he fell ill with a terrible fever. His mother made poultices and remedies that generations of woodsfolk had learned. Some were to reduce the awful aches and pains that raced from joint to joint. Some were to bring down the fever itself. And some were to keep evil away and attract friendly spirits to protect and heal the young boy.
    Nothing worked. The second night he became delirious. On the morning of the third day, Pieder's mother begged Douglas to seek out the Witch of the Wood, a superstition with unusual staying power amongst the local folk. Pieder's father, certain of failure and without an ounce of hope, reluctantly agreed. He did this act not out of love for his son, whom he was certain was destined for death within hours, but for love of his wife who would never rest unless no effort had been spared to save her beloved child. With the death of Frederick, the house had been filled with anger, regret, and recrimination. Pieder's father was determined that Pieder's death would not come so close to destroying his family.