14 KiB
[RT] Glimwarden, Chapter 5
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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Score: 35
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Created: 2016-06-10T12:14:27
Post:
Comments:
u/CouteauBleu [+13] We are the Empire. (4 hours later)
"Sooo... these are the three new glimwardens."
"Yes."
"An intellectual who likes to read about science and engineering, an intellectual who likes to read about politics, and an intellectual who likes to read about dashing heroics."
"Yup."
"The town is f*cked."
EDIT: Also, being Sanders sucks. No one takes Sanders seriously. I'm hoping our resident... I was going to say psychopath, but I'm not sure it's the right word, I'm hoping Philip will teach him at least some basic sociopolitical analysis before he inevitably decides Sanders is not worth the effort.
u/aeschenkarnos [+2] (18 hours later)
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (21 hours later)
That fits surprisingly well, actually.
u/None [+12] (38 minutes later)
[deleted]
u/rhaps0dy4 [+3] (2 hours later)
He wants to become a dictator though, he's saying that all the time.
Still a competent ruler.
u/Bowbreaker [+5] Solitary Locust (17 hours later)
He seems like he would be a competent dictator as well. And one that would actually care to set up a system that doesn't just crumble or decay upon his retirement or death.
u/JulianWyvern [+2] Wayward Wanderer (3 hours later)
It's not who we are in the inside that matters, it is our impact on the world.
Philip is reminding me of Ciaphas Cain actually.
u/None [+8] (48 minutes later)
[deleted]
u/alexanderwales [+8] Time flies like an arrow (56 minutes later)
I'll work on dialing it back a bit - thanks (as always) for the feedback.
(For what it's worth, Sander is at least partly modeled on how I was at that age.)
u/Zephyr1011 [+7] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (6 hours later)
Personally, I didn't find it overdone at all
u/Iconochasm [+3] (11 hours later)
It seems to be focused on Melanie, at least in this chapter. A guy can easily be particularly oblivious regarding the girl he has a crush on. She at least tolerates him, and that's not a "no".
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (6 minutes later)
Last time: Philip presented an idea for filling the position of glimwarden via competition at the city council meeting, Sander went off into the woods to get some training, and I need to get better at summaries
This time: politics, policy, and polis, new alliances, what happened at Moon Rise, and why people have horses
A shorter talky chapter this week in exchange for a longer actiony chapter next week.
u/jplewicke [+5] (2 hours later)
Politics wasn’t about policy.
You've got to love an antihero who's influenced by Robin Hanson.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+3] Mouse Army (11 hours later)
Isnt the economic horse genocide a bit premature? If rune tractors are still expensive enough to be shared and yet the ways to central city relatively far when walking, horses shouldn't have hit their sustenance wage limit yet.
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (17 hours later)
tl;dr: Horses are like renting, runework engines are like buying a house.
I haven't gone into much detail on runework yet, but a runework engine is clean, quiet, low maintenance, and runs "forever" with no need for fuel. It's a sizable initial investment, but after that you don't have upkeep costs to worry about. Because it can run all day without consuming fuel, it's better to never have one sitting idle. If you were a baker who spent an hour in the morning delivering bread, it would be an enormous waste of your resources to just park it next to your shop and have it sit idle for the other twenty-three hours of the day, when instead you could pool resources with your neighbors and share the runework cart. Typically this is structured with a long-term loan rather than an actual upfront payment. (A farmer will typically own their own runework tractor, because they're using it a large portion of the day.)
A horse needs about two hectares in order to get enough food to survive, which is somewhere between four and eight times as much as a person needs (depending on the person's diet). In real-world rural areas, that's not a problem, since land is relatively cheap, but in Light's Hollow pretty much all protected land is in use. Horses need lots of equipment to be usable, plus lots of labor, plus somewhere to be stored. This is aside from dealing with all the filth they generate, which is a problem if you're using them on roads. Beyond all that, a horse is good for only a limited number of hours of labor per day.
Some of it is also explained by legislation. Horses produce something like thirty pounds of manure a day, which is a serious problem in cities if you care about sanitation at all (and that's the say nothing of the urine). Once the horse is forced out of the city center where the majority of the population works and lives, whether by fines, fees, or blanket prohibition, horses are relegated to the outskirts ... but most of what you'd want to use a horse for is to go from the outskirts to the interior.
Hopefully that all makes sense.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+1] Mouse Army (18 hours later)
Very good. Hadn't thought about the very different Ressource constraints that make horses much more expensive and concede the Argument.
Still makes the Lack of any Form of public Transport a bit puzzzling, a Single runework tractor seems like it would produce great public good - but easily enough explained by the usual coordination Problems.
u/CouteauBleu [+4] We are the Empire. (6 hours later)
“People treat you differently when they know that you have money,” said Philip. He gave Sander a genuine smile. He’d had these conversations with his father, but those had been solemn affairs between teacher and student. Sander seemed to think that this problem was a stupid one that he could solve in a few hours thought.
I like that this paragraph is the only occurrence of the word "genuine". I think Philip being amused/pleased by this situation says something about how he thinks, the I'm not sure what.
Also, is it me or is Melanie worried by the prospect of Sanders going into danger?
u/Iconochasm [+6] (11 hours later)
I think Philip being amused/pleased by this situation says something about how he thinks, the I'm not sure what.
Perhaps I'm being overgenerous to Philip, but I think he was just enjoying the chance to explain the sort of social interactions that interest him, in the way they interest him.
u/AmeteurOpinions [+3] Finally, everyone was working together. (4 hours later)
I feel like I want an adjacency matrix for the lanterns.
Also, I've seen both sides of this conversation way too many times:
“Is it any good?” asked Sander.
“You claim to love my cooking,” replied Melanie.
“That sounds suspiciously like you’re avoiding my question,” said Sander. He was smiling, but she was not. “Is it any good?”
“It’s a traditional dish,” said Melanie. “When the first settlers founded Light’s Hollow, they had to slaughter a number of the horses and oxen that had pulled their traveling lantern along. They made noodles from the last of the flour they’d brought with them and used spring onions they found near the river.”
“That … is actually still not an answer,” said Sander.
“It’s horse,” said Melanie. “Do you like the taste of horse?”
“I don’t think I’ve ever tasted horse before,” said Sander. “I just wanted to know whether you liked the soup.”
Melanie pinched the bridge of her nose.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
If you want a non-final map, there's this one. Though I need to remake it with better contours and more artistry (I kind of suck at graphic design). From the top going clockwise, the lanterns are: Rogue (Challenger), Healer (Mender), Ranger, Watcher, Builder, Singer. With Chancellor's Lantern in the center.
u/rhaps0dy4 [+1] (a day later)
It also seems like the drawn fields and houses are not at scale, if there is about 1 hour of brisk walking from the edge lanterns to the center.
Maybe that's intentional though. And it looks good.
Edit: wait, maybe the fields are that big, it's not an implausible size.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
At the scale it's at there, the squares are city blocks rather than houses. It should be roughly six miles from one end to the other. Field sizes are taken from comparisons to what I could see on Google Maps.
u/waylandertheslayer [+1] (8 days later)
You're probably aware of this already, but most places with limited land and high population (e.g. most of Europe) had many small fields rather than few big ones. That mostly changed with the Industrial Revolution where land became concentrated in fewer, wealthier farmers (before, the land was owned by a few people but they sublet most of it, in feudal systems and the like). Currently there are two main reasons for the large fields - the fact that artificial fertilisers and new strains of crops, together with easier transport and more trade, make it easy to grow only one crop in a large area, and that it makes it easier for tractors to navigate the fields. There's a real problem in the UK with a lack of hedgerows, and a lot of animal species are suffering because of it, now that field boundaries have been removed.
tl;dr modern field boundaries (especially in the US, due to the relatively high amount of land per person) aren't that good of a model for an agricultural society with very limited land.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (8 days later)
I might shrink the field sizes down somewhat. Do you have any sources I could look at for field size? I just finished reading through Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming [PDF], but they define "farm size" in terms of acres of land operated by the farm, which says nothing about the actual fields themselves.
In Light's Hollow they do have tractor analogs, and they're fairly advanced in terms of scientific understanding, including hundreds of years of intentional selective breeding, nitrogen fixing, and farming equipment (ploughs, harvesters, seeders, etc.). So they only share faint similarities with feudal systems, mostly in that the majority of the land and capital is owned by a minority of the population and there are tenant farmers who do the bulk of the actual labor.
u/waylandertheslayer [+1] (8 days later)
If the setting is closer to modern-day farming, then my earlier post was wrong. I misunderstood the setting, probably because the story isn't that far advanced yet.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (a day later)
Wait, I thought lanters were positioned to maximize the area that would be vulnerable to darklings under a single lantern, but safe under two of them? Should the distance between two lanterns be greater than the sum of their radiuses then?
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Yeah, that's one of the reasons that the map needs to be redrawn. And since field strength is additive, there shouldn't be nice circles like that, it should look more blobby at the points of intersection.
u/elevul [+2] Cyoria Observer (27 minutes later)
Isn't it weird that Philip has no experience with romantic language? He ought to have heard it in school or later in taverns, or have read it in books.
u/CouteauBleu [+7] We are the Empire. (7 hours later)
Honestly, I'm not sure what Sanders is describing actually is love, or even attraction. More like, I don't know... curiosity? Fascination? He does generally seem infatuated with her though. Maybe.
u/JulianWyvern [+1] Wayward Wanderer (a day later)
He's caught on that there's more beneath the surface of Melanie, and from what he infers of those depth he thinks it's something that interests him. He wants to know more to decide if he loves her or not
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (34 minutes later)
It's not that he's unfamiliar with romantic language, it's that he's not a hundred percent sure that's what he's hearing, or if it is what he's hearing, how he's supposed to respond to it.
u/Bowbreaker [+2] Solitary Locust (17 hours later)
That was some pretty weird romantic language though.
u/DaystarEld [+2] Pokémon Professor (8 days later)
Good chapter. I enjoyed Phillip and Sanders interactions, though I'll chip my 2 cents into the pile for toning down obliviousness a bit more. We're still getting to know both of them though, so maybe it'll fade on its own anyway.
Sent a typo report through the site (gotta get that plugin for mine), but quick non-spelling typo of sorts, Sanders says he has never tried horse before two times while talking to Melanie.
u/TotesMessenger [+1] (8 days later)
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