25 KiB
[RT] Glimwarden, Chapter 6
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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Score: 35
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Created: 2016-06-17T13:36:58
Post:
Comments:
u/CouteauBleu [+12] We are the Empire. (4 hours later)
Philip sat down beside the limp body and started thinking about how he could use this situation to his advantage.
... Good thing you keep your priorities straight, I guess?
Random thoughts:
This is probably going to mess with the tournament and the lantern construction big time, right? They're probably going to need a lot of replacements glimwardens, for starters.
Sanders, grow a sense of self-preservation, please. This is kind of embarrassing right now.
I love how Philip looks completely badass from Sanders' POV, unharmed, implacable, covered in darkling gore, in the middle of a sea of bodies, calmly contemplating his certain death... Then you switch to Philip's POV and realize he's unharmed because the darklings completely ignored him.
I hope Sanders and Philip start bouncing thoughts at each other. They're both very "optimize literally everything" people, with similar-ish drives and completely opposed (complementary?) outlooks and skills. "So THAT's why they didn't want to accept my fishing quotas! What a satisfying, non-politically-motivated, completely rational reason!".
I can't help but notice that the super darkling king murderboss made its villain getaway here. This cannot possibly not be a problem later.
alexanderwales: Have you thought about including a link in each chapter to the corresponding reddit post? It would sort of compensate for their almost empty comment sections, and be useful for people discovering glimwarden through other channels than r/rational.
Why aren't there snipers defending the town? Whether gunmen, bowmen or crossbowmen, it would seem much easier to build a reserve army out of long-range fighters: you don't need to feed them hearts, there's less of a morale problem since they can stay on fortifications, and they can hunt darklings close to town in relative safety. Might be one of those coordination problems Philip should work on once he takes over the town.
Am I the only one who got 'Attack on Titan' / 'Worm Endbringers' flashbacks reading this chapter?
u/space_fountain [+1] (4 hours later)
alexanderwales: Have you thought about including a link in each chapter to the corresponding reddit post? It would sort of compensate for their almost empty comment sections, and be useful for people discovering glimwarden through other channels than r/rational.
It might even be worth investigating embedding the comments at the bottom of your blog. I know from my own investigation it doesn't work great, but you could at least give people an idea of the level of discussion available on here.
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (4 hours later)
Have you thought about including a link in each chapter to the corresponding reddit post? It would sort of compensate for their almost empty comment sections, and be useful for people discovering glimwarden through other channels than r/rational.
I've been dragging my feet on installing the Wordpress plug-in that embeds reddit comments in place of having comments hosted on the site (this is the method). Mostly I think it's going to be some un-fun work getting it functional, and when I have the free time I'd rather be writing, which is both fun and productive. I will eventually get around to making it work though, ideally within a template that only applies to this story. (There are a few downsides, like turning away people who don't understand or like reddit, but consolidation of discussion is a big enough positive that the downsides aren't what's stopping me.)
u/gryfft [+10] (35 minutes later)
I can't think of another one you've written, but this was a great all-out battle scene! You captured the excitement and rush of battle while also showing it to be a brutal, disorganized mess.
I really enjoyed the comparison and contrast between Sander's and Philip's perspectives. They're both intelligent but inexperienced, and they understand each other well, for two people who have fundamentally orthogonal views of the universe and the people in it.
This seems like the beginning of a long and productive friendship, which is doubly entertaining considering how little experience either of them have with friendship, and that Sander's mindset is essentially "I wanna be the hero," and Philip's is "I wanna be the big bad."
u/None [+9] (2 hours later)
[deleted]
u/CouteauBleu [+5] We are the Empire. (4 hours later)
"I have no resources and no skills and no experience. This should be fine." - Sanders has some problems.
It's not a problem if he turns out to be right. Also, I love this passage:
We have to look on the bright side here. Yes, we’re facing an unknown threat on our second day of training to become a glimwarden, we only have a non-magical sword that we’ve never trained with, our admittedly meager power is trying to use up our literal or metaphorical life force, everyone within shouting distance is stronger than us, and why did we think this was a good idea again?
u/traverseda [+5] With dread but cautious optimism (a day later)
Sanders has some problems.
Yeah, but they're fairly minor.
u/4t0m [+8] Chaos Legion (5 hours later)
Really enjoying this story. I enjoyed Shadows of the Limelight well enough, but this has surpassed that in every way from my perspective. I'm super impressed and happy to see your original fiction deliver on the promise you showed with The Metropolitan Man. Of course, this is just my opinion; others may have liked Shadows of the Limelight more than I did.
Also, I was surprised to see you deviate from the Sander->Philip->Melanie pattern, but I think it was a good choice, and it's good that you did it early on.
u/CouteauBleu [+4] We are the Empire. (8 hours later)
Yeah, the dynamic viewpoint change felt really natural and welcome.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (9 hours later)
For the last few months I've been editing a manuscript that strictly adheres to a rotation through three characters, and I've been having a hell of a time with it because each of the characters have different story beats and I can't quite seem to hit them in the right sequence while maintaining the Issah->Williiam->Ellebeth->Issah cycle.
So here, the original plan was to go through all four characters in a defined cycle, but as soon as I ran into a problem with it I dropped it.
I agree that Shadows was ... maybe not everything I had wanted it to be.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+3] Mouse Army (a day later)
I for one really liked shadows. The fame/Power connection satisfied my cravings for narratives extremly well.
u/4t0m [+2] Chaos Legion (2 days later)
I'd be curious to hear at some point what you think worked and didn't work in Shadows.
u/alexanderwales [+4] Time flies like an arrow (2 days later)
http://thingswhichborepeople.blogspot.com/2016/01/shadows-of-limelight-post-mortem.html
u/4t0m [+2] Chaos Legion (2 days later)
Oh awesome! Thanks for the link.
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (a day later)
Issah->Williiam->Ellebeth?
How far exactly did you go with the translation convention?
u/biomatter [+1] (5 days later)
FWIW, I loved SotL. Your world-building was on point, and that's always what tickles me when I'm looking for something good to read. If there were narrative problems, I didn't notice them past the cool characters and application of powers.
u/redstonerodent [+7] High Council of Gallifrey (7 hours later)
Since we know some details about the output and arrangement of lanterns, I did some analysis of different layouts.
The gliminance at a location from a lantern is proportional to 1/d^(3), where d is the distance. Gliminances from multiple lanterns simply add. I normalized such that the gliminance from a lantern one mile away is 1. I assumed that the anywhere with gliminance at least 1 is considered safe. Sander's calculations about gliminance are a bit confusing, and it's not clear whether "safe" is gliminance 1 or what the gliminance is 1 mile away from an outer lantern, in the direction opposite the central lantern (gliminance 1.18). I also assumed that all lanterns have the same gliminance output, and there aren't any terrain objects that get in the way.
I assumed lanterns are arranged in a triangular grid, so each lantern has up to 6 neighbors, with adjacent lanterns 2 miles apart. I assumed lanterns are built around the central lantern in a circle, and the eight lantern in adject to two existing lanterns.
All distances are in miles, and areas in square miles.
Here's an imgur album of plots of gliminance and safe regions for different arrangements of laterns.
Here's the amount of safe area for each number of lanterns:
lanterns | area with gliminance > 1 1 3.14 = pi 2 6.95 = 2.21 pi 3 10.78 = 3.43 pi 4 14.58 = 4.64 pi 5 18.38 = 5.85 pi 6 22.22 = 7.07 pi 7 25.83 = 8.22 pi 8 28.99 = 9.22 piIn units of pi square miles, the first lantern adds 1 to the safe area, each of the next 6 lanterns add 1.2, and the 8th lantern only adds 1 again. I haven't checked, but I think lanterns after the 8th also add about 1. So the most efficent city size is 7 lanterns; after that, it's better to start a new city than to keep adding lanterns. It's more efficient for Light's Hollow to create a new city ~10 miles away than to add another lantern. (This might not be true if my assumptions about lantern spacing and target gliminance were wrong.)
It's possible to have the lanterns more spread out, and still be safe. They can be about 1.25 times more spread out before holes appear in between the lanterns, and 1.35 times more spread out before the safe regions aren't connected. But spreading out the lanterns doesn't always add more safe area; the safe area is maximized at about 1.30 times the spread, with an area of 32.7695.
It's possible there are other, more efficient arrangements of lanterns. The triangular grid is nice, and almost certainly the most efficient arrangement for very large cities, but maybe something like four lanterns in a squares gets you more area per lantern.
I can do more analysis if people want to see more, or I can share my (very messy) Mathematica notebook.
u/Esryok [+4] (12 hours later)
Here's some more numbers, 'cause math is fun. Making the same normalization of "gliminance at 1 mile is 1":
Event/Location Distance estimate Gliminance estimate Border of Light's Hollow 1 mile from lantern 1.177 Sander's Grapnel fight .5 km past markers 0.581 Sander's Fracture flight 60 feet past markers 1.142 Philip's radio chat 20 feet past markers 1.165 Darkling watching Philip 320 feet past markers 1.007 Merry's record 2 miles past markers 0.080 Healer's Lantern (unlit) 0 0.776 Melting Schism (Healer's relit) 200 / 500 / 1000 feet from lantern 18,400 / 681 / 147 Given that the Fracture was "being torn apart at the seams" under 1.142 gliminance yet the Schism was not immediately obliterated by Healer's Lantern at 100+ times as much radiation, I wonder if only the surface of a darkling suffers a lantern's effect.
u/dalitt [+3] (8 hours later)
Surely you can do a bit better by moving the 8th lantern a bit farther away...
My reasoning is that adding a lantern "at infinity" adds pi square miles of safe area. Moving it towards the existing lanterns will increase the amount of new safe land until the circle of radius 1 around the lantern begins to intersect the area that is already safe. In any case, this is some pretty cool analysis. It's like a continuous analogue of circle-packing.
u/redstonerodent [+4] High Council of Gallifrey (9 hours later)
Good idea!
Before, I had the eight lantern 2*sqrt(3)=3.46 away from the center. The distance that maximizes the safe area is 4.03. The safe area is 30.33, and it looks like this. (Assuming the first 7 lanterns have the standard spacing)
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (15 hours later)
Thanks for doing this math! I'm going to use those plots when I redraw the map with proper contours. On the other hand, drat, someone actually did the math.
Sander's calculations about gliminance are a bit confusing, and it's not clear whether "safe" is gliminance 1 or what the gliminance is 1 mile away from an outer lantern, in the direction opposite the central lantern (gliminance 1.18).
Sander admits that his math was wrong. His chain of logic had been:
- The far border is 1 mile.
- Gliminance at the border is let's-call-it 1.
- Lanterns therefore project gliminance 1 to 1 mile.
But he realizes that this isn't right, because if each lantern projected field strength 1 at 1 mile, then the 1 mile border would have a field strength of higher than 1. Field strength for an individual lantern must be less than 1 at 1 mile, if 1 mile defines the current border.
He gets interrupted by Philip before he can start doing a recalculation, partly because I'm not sure how you'd go about doing that calculation without access to at least a pencil and paper.
If you'd like to help me out with some math, you could work backwards and figure out what an individual lantern projects to, if a hexagon of lanterns two miles apart projects to one mile at the far end. (Ideally, this gives a somewhat inefficient solution that still saturates liveable area, as otherwise I will probably have to do some revision to my stated numbers.)
u/redstonerodent [+3] High Council of Gallifrey (23 hours later)
I'll assume that the edge farthest from the center lantern is 1 mile from the outer lantern (the edges aren't constant distance from outer lanterns). That means the target gliminance is 1.77, instead of 1.
With only one lantern, you get 0.95 mile radius, and an area of 2.82, down from 3.14.
With 7 lanterns: previously the farthest edge was 3.06 from the center; now it's 3. The safe area is now 24.38 (instead of 24.99). It looks like this (previous version). Overall, increasing the target gliminance has a similar effect to spacing the lanterns more and scaling everything down.
I think it would be reasonable for characters in the story to not have done these calculations, and be working primarily on the approximation that lanterns protect a circle around them with radius 1 mile. Then the city would be 7 tangent circles, plus the gaps in between them, possibly plus something on the outside where circles meet.
u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Yeah, that works wonderfully, thank you.
u/Zephyr1011 [+1] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (21 hours later)
I get that if a lantern projects gliminance x/d^3 to a point at distance d, and at one mile from one vertex of the hexagon along the line between it and the opposite vertex the gliminance is 1 arbitrary unit of glim, then:
x=1/(1+1/3^3 +1/5^3 +2/(7^1.5 )+2/(19^1.5 ))
=0.84949 arbitrary units of glim
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (3 minutes later)
Last time: The alarm at Healer's Lantern sounded. Sander and Philip went to the rescue.
This time: Lantern failures, the nature of the Auxiliary, and a battle.
Also, I'm really glad that I choose this schedule, since I think it gives me a disproportionate amount of breathing room in terms of branching out. Hopefully it's not too much of an annoyance.
u/CarsonCity314 [+2] (an hour later)
Not at all - I'm a huge fan of your worldbuilding and approach to exposition and pacing, and I imagine it takes significant thought and revision to get right. I'd like to write more, myself, but I keep running into problems creating believable early-story conflicts that are relevant to the protagonist(s).
Not to sidetrack this thread, but are there any creative writing resources you'd recommend I look into?
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
Writing Excuses is a great podcast that covers a lot of important concepts.
I'm a big follower of Sanderson's First, Second, and Third laws of magic.
Stephen King's On Writing is one of the only books that I'd recommend on the subject. There are a ton of books about how to write well, but don't read too many of them, because at some point you're doing the equivalent of buying a bunch of running shoes and never actually putting them on to go jog around the block.
Dan Harmon's Story Circle Method is my preferred method of structuring stories; it's a prescriptivist version of Joseph Campbell's descriptivist The Hero with a Thousand Faces. (Glimwarden's plot is structured as story circles within story circles within story circles next to story circles.)
Also, /u/daystareld and I will be putting out a podcast in the next few weeks, "Rationally Writing", which is about writing rationally, so keep an eye on that.
My number one advice is to read a lot and write a lot, and do both of those with an analytical mindset. Break things down to see how they work and why they work, or in some cases why they fail. If you need help getting into an analytical mindset, try reading some in-depth criticism of something that you like or are at least familiar with. (Though they're not about writing, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud and the Youtube channel Every Frame a Painting were both things that influenced how I think about telling stories.)
Edit: Oh, also TV Tropes, which is itself a form of multimedia criticism.
u/SvalbardCaretaker [+7] Mouse Army (3 hours later)
Awesomely done! I did expect sanders to at least have one lucky strike but you nicely subverted The Heros Luck.
Thoughts:
A) So obviously stone fortifications give some measure of protection from darklings (lantern buildings). Is the absence of walls part of the inefficiency of Lights Hollow or are big building projects just too ressource intensive within the restraints of the lanterns radius?
Quick calculation: 10000m circumference on one lantern, a wall 2m high and 50cm thick needs a cube of 21m stone. Seems doable, even if we double thickness.
B) One possible solution to the trouble of temporary failures would be to have a runecart with a traveling lantern ready. Not cheap, but cheap compared to loosing 3 glimwardens! Man, Lights Hollow is pissing me off even more than real world politics/inefficiencies.
C) One way for Phil to wrest advantage is to start eating the hundreds of hearts lying around. Presumably all glimwardens are DEAD - an existential problem for the town! The power that comes with having the strongest bind in town should be incomparable, cutting his route to route to dictatorship short.
D) At least something should be done about conserving the hearts, running to the lantern building and getting the conservation thingy. I mean its probably the last supply the town is going to easily get...
u/space_fountain [+7] (4 hours later)
I'm pretty sure most glimwardens made it out fine. Sanders made a big point about them basically running as they started to tire to prevent exactly the situation your talking about. Basically it would probably be better to loose a lantern than to have all of them die
u/CCC_037 [+2] (2 days later)
One way for Phil to wrest advantage is to start eating the hundreds of hearts lying around.
Is this an advantage? If he eats any Hearts, then he's either an Auxiliary or a Glimwarden for life. As an Auxiliary, he can expect to die the next time there's a lantern failure (the Darklings probably didn't attack him primarily because he was the only one there who hadn't eaten any Hearts). And we already know he doesn't want to be a Glimwarden (he merely wants to be seen as someone who wants to be a Glimwarden, preferably losing the contest without looking like he's losing it on purpose).
So, eating Hearts at this point works against his real aims.
u/Little_Cat_Z [+5] (4 hours later)
Aren't travel lanterns a thing? I assume that means a form or portable lantern. Why wouldn't it be standard practice to move one or two of those to the site of a breach? Or have a smaller, independent lantern in every lantern building. This would give the engineers inside the time to repair the main lantern while the glimwardens focused on evacuating everyone else.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (5 hours later)
Much more on that later (probably next chapter, depending on how I end up structuring it). The tl;dr is that it's a combination of coordination problems, politics, engineering constraints, entrenched procedures, and cost/benefit analysis.
u/daydev [+3] (6 hours later)
I remember our universe's "named after people" units such as Watts being brought up and explained as translation convention, but what about mixing imperial and metric units? In particular, distances. Feet, miles, centimeters, meters in this chapter are all over the place. Is it intended? It probably was the same in previous chapters too, but I only now noticed my confusion.
u/mohammadashworth [+3] (18 hours later)
When Mr. Wales and I were in early talks about the translation of The Glimwarden Chronicles, he suggested standardization of all units to metric. I objected vehemently to this, and explained that the role of translation is to aid the reader in immersion. The primary audience for this translation is readers with English as a first language, who are primarily American (some three hundred million out of four hundred million). If the translation had used kilograms instead of pounds when describing a person's weight, the average reader would have to stop for a moment to grapple with what that meant, because there would be no instinctual understanding.
I have occasionally used metric where I believe the average reader would understand what was meant by it. Meters convert well enough to yards that they would hardly give anyone pause. Centimeters are also, I believe, widely known to the average reader as a smaller unit of measure, and they scan better than fractions of an inch. In this particular chapter, "miles" are used because they convert rather cleanly from the distance used by the original text; in this case, "1.6 kilometers" would read exceptionally poorly, while "one kilometer" would be too inaccurate. There are other places within the work where I have translated a distance to kilometers, but this is mostly done to achieve a particular feel or tone that the original text captured.
Your Humble Translator,
Mohammad Ashworth
u/daydev [+8] (19 hours later)
Curse you, America, for forcing the rest of the world to deal with the imperial units silliness by being the majority of the audience!
u/TotesMessenger [+1] (a day later)
I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:
- [/r/glimwarden] Glimwarden Discussion Link: Chapter 6
^(If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads.) ^(Info ^/ ^Contact)
u/CouteauBleu [+1] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
Hypothesis: Sander's fishing quotas were refused because quotas-related debates are a big highlight of the public council sessions, so the private council decided that removing them would lower attendance too much to be worth the time spared.
u/RMcD94 [+1] (3 days later)
Request: Consistency in units. Don't mix imperial and metric. The only places that to do that in our world (the anglosphere mostly) are for very specific reasons. Though I'm sure /u/mohammadashworth has an explanation.
My preference would be a wholesale switch to metric but it's pretty weird seeing Sanders evaluate a distance as 100m then talk about 300ft.
Edit: Now that I read the comments I see that he actually has replied to another comment on the same thing... lol