Answer the first
Feb. 6th, 2004 12:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sythyry![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
moosl asks: I am an off-worlder and view
your world sporadically. Where can one learn of your world
succintly?
IC: I must admit that I have never, myself, left the World Tree, and I am not as familiar as I might be with whatever books may appear in offworld bookstores.
For that matter, do offworlds even use proper books? On the Water-Tree, evidently, there are speaking icicles used instead of books ... though, in other stories, someone does talk about "peeling the hero's hide off and using it to bind some low-grade pornography." Perhaps speaking icicles are sold in leather sheaths, I suppose.
Still, I daresay that you live in a somewhat more real universe than the Water-Tree. What do books look like there?
OOC: You can buy the World Tree book. The first half of it is a travelogue or fictional ethnography of the World Tree. The second half is the actual RPG rules. We did intend that the first half stand on its own, as a work of fictional nonfiction, and many non-gamers have enjoyed it as that.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-06 09:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-06 09:45 am (UTC)To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 10:41 am (UTC)The words themselves are stored on spinning magnetic disks hundreds or thousands of miles away, transferred overland by wires buried under the ground or suspended overhead, depending on the area.
Every time there's a storm, some of the wires break, and crews have to go out and fix them. Sometimes it takes a couple days.
It's also a relatively recent innovation to make a version of the local device small enough to carry around with you in your pocket. I don't have one of those, although I have one that can be set up on a table in only a few minutes.
So we have plenty of normal paper books too.
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 11:22 am (UTC)Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 12:56 pm (UTC)I am sitting in a town called London in a country called England while the machine that connects to you in your world is several thousand miles away in a country called America. To get my message to you it is moved from one machine to another, each one working out the best way to send the message to get it closer to it's destination. At on point the message has to cross a large area of water ... do you have those on your world? Anyway to cross this the message is either sent along a big wire under this water or sometmes it may be sent up high into the air where other machines spin around our planet and are high enough to see both sides of the water at the same time.
To give you an idea of how wide this water is I should perhaps tell you that I once flew on a big bird that travelled twice as fast as its own sound goes and it still took over three hours to fly over the water.
I'm sorry if any of this shocks you but I can assure you that it is true and as proof of my veracity I will quote a well known saying on my world : "Trust me, I'm a consultant"
May your fire never grow cold and may your magik flourish.
peter - off-world monster, but friendly
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 02:09 pm (UTC)We have large bodies of water, some as many as [thirty miles] wide (more than halfway across the world-branch [continent]) and [sixty or seventy] long. I don't know how fast sound moves there ... for that matter, I don't know how fast it moves here. Still, assuming that you can't outrun sound on two feet, I imagine that your body of water must be quite long. How wide are the branches of your world? I gather they must not be tilted, or the bodies of water would be much smaller.
And, how do you manage to get the messages to cross the great water? I imagine, oh, birds with their claws full of lightning bolts, flapping over the sea.
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 02:46 pm (UTC)I suppose we could use the real moon, but it's too far away to be convenient, and half the time it's not even visible.
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 04:49 pm (UTC)In our world there are trees, but they are much smaller than your world tree - at least if I understand your world tree correctly.
Us monsters don't live in trees. we have homes built of bricks, wood and other stuff and live together in towns and cities.
In order to explain it I need to explain our units of measuring distance. If I take a step forward ... well a big step and stretch as I do so ... I move roughly a distance we call a yard. Now if I take 1760 of these big steps I travel a distance we call a mile. [dont worry about why it is 1760 since the number is one that has been decided in our history many years ago . the only thing you might like to play with, if you enjoy mathematics, is to see how may different ways the 1760 can be divided up into equal parts that are whole numbers of yards and that will give you a clue as to why it is as it is] Anyway, I am digressing, a thing we Mathematicians do :) Now do you still remember the mile I mentioned earlier? Well our world is a big ball of rock and if you could walk around the edge of it all the way it would be roughly 25000 of those miles! Because our world is this big it doesn't look like it is a ball when you are standoing on it ... indeed if you just see a little bit of it you would think it was flat ... actually the ground isn't flat but has lumps and dips. The water collects in the dips and we live on the higher drier bits :)
does that help explain it? I do hope so. i know it must seem very strange to you but then your world seems strange to us. our world is a ver beautiful place and I can show you some pictures of things on
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 05:11 pm (UTC)I am incomp ...
............ lete
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 06:24 pm (UTC)As do we. We live on a tree, but our homes are not built in small trees. Admittedly, most are wood; brick is not the cheapest material.
Well our world is a big ball of rock and if you could walk around the edge of it all the way it would be roughly 25000 of those miles!
Aha! You are trying to bewilder me and fill my eyes with lies, but I have discerned your approach! Earlier you said that you sent messages from one place to a far-separated one ... but now you claim that your world is a ball! This is clearly impossible. For, only the top of the ball would be civilizable, just as only the top of World Tree branches are civilizable. The sides of the ball would naturally be like our Verticals, tangles of horizontal forests and terrible monsters. The bottom, of course, would be entirely forbidding. So it is impossible that there are two civilized places separated by such a distance as you claim.
Now, then. What, actually, does your world look like?
Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-07 04:45 pm (UTC)When you are on your world, if you let go of something I presume that it tends to fall to the ground. The force that pulls it down is called, on our world at least, gravity. All things are pulled by this gravity and the centre of our ball is where the gravity pull seems to be centered. This means that whereever you stand on our ball world gravity is pulling you towards the centre of the ball and "up" seems to be away from the centre.
So you see we can in fact live all over our ball world. I live in a country called England and on the opposite side of the world is a country called Australia. People in both countries can stand on the ball and both think they are on the top!
If you look at http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev254/ev25415_UK.A2003108.1245.1km.jpg you will see a picture of the country where I live taken from high up in the sky and if you look at http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/ you can see many pictures from little moons that are looking down to help us predict what the weather will be.
Does that help you understand our strange world? I hope so.
Peace
peter
Re: Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-07 06:53 pm (UTC)In any case, gravity on our world is entirely uniform, in strength and direction, throughout the explored and readily-observed universe. Of course a great deal cannot be seen through the world-foliage, but we have been able to cast excellent far-seeing spells and observe that far-distant world-leaves fall at the same way that nearby ones do, counting air resistance.
Of course we don't know what the bottom of the Tree is like (or if there is one); it's too far away. I suppose gravity could change down there. If there is a "there". Similarly, our observations about the heights of the sky are somewhat limited, though I vaguely remember something about Flokin dropping a star and having it fall at a normal pattern, counting air resistance.
In any case, non-uniform gravity must be hideously confusing. If gravity always goes towards the center of the ball, how is it that the sun and moons and star-serpent and whatnot don't fall to the ground? Our sun is supported by a track, but the track is horizontal and the sun can roll nicely along it. How do you manage yours? For that matter, do you even have a sun?
The first set of pictures is impressive. The second one is simply baffling -- if those are the leaves of your world, they seem singularly ratty; and if they are not, what are they?
I do like the idea of artificial moons... if I ever get exceedingly good at enchantment, perhaps I shall make one.
With wishes that you find ... um ... whatever creatures such as yourself find desirable,
I remain,
Sythyry
Re: Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-09 04:17 pm (UTC)Instead of the sun going around our world, our world goes around its sun. So do several other worlds, but we are not aware of anyone living on them. This is, in fact, a matter that our people have argued about for many lifetimes: does anyone live on the other worlds, and if so, what are they like? Some people think that there may be plants or very small animals (do you have bacteria on the World Tree?) on the other worlds, but no intelligent beings or even large animals. Others think that the other worlds have very strange beings living in them, drifting through the air.
Re: Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-09 05:19 pm (UTC)We do, indeed, have plants and very small animals. And strange beings who drift through the air; some of them are Khtsoyis [the aerial cephalopod prime species.]
For that matter, I have been known to drift through the air myself.
Re: Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-09 06:08 pm (UTC)We also have a moon, which travels around our world in a similar fashion.
Re: Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-09 07:59 pm (UTC)You don't live in a world. You live in a whirled.
Re: Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-09 08:06 pm (UTC)Might imagine up a world that does have such things though, so thanks for the idea.
Re: Our ball world
Date: 2004-02-10 06:33 pm (UTC)It certainly feels as though we live in a whirled, sometimes.
... the bit that got missed
Date: 2004-02-06 05:47 pm (UTC)As to the flying birds with lightening bolts, I have to admit that I don't understand all the details but I think if you imagine that the birds are very very small ... much smaller than you could see with your eyes even right close up ... and that the birds can fly at a number of different speeds which causes them to go in different directions then it is roughly right. We have a science called quantum physics which explains a lot of things like that (and would probably relate to the magik in your world) but I have not studied it so I cannot explain all the details.
Perhaps ypu can tell me, was I polite with the way I ended my lasty message? I thought that "May your fire never grow cold and may your magik flourish" would be polite to you, I hope it was. Normally I end my messages like this :
Peace
peter
[Hope that is OK with you too]
Re: ... the bit that got missed
Date: 2004-02-06 06:30 pm (UTC)There are certainly quantal aspects to magic. For example, spells are categorized by complexity, measured by the amount of cley necessary to learn the spell. The complexity of a spell is always a multiple of 5. I imagine your quantum physics is something similar.
Perhaps ypu can tell me, was I polite with the way I ended my lasty message? I thought that "May your fire never grow cold and may your magik flourish" would be polite to you,
That is indeed polite! Admittedly, it is not the current court farewell of Vheshrame -- but there's no reason you would know or care about the current court farewell of Vheshrame. Even in Daukrhame they don't care about it, and Daukrhame is unimaginably closer than your supposedly-bally cosmos.
The smile of Reluu ever upon your head, the ghost of brandy ever upon your lips, and perfumed silk rolled out before you to tread upon! (And that is the court farewell of Vheshrame, as of a month ago. It might have changed. At the Academy we don't always care very much about it, except for some people, and the Academy is a lot closer to the court than Daukhrame.)
But peace is a truly excellent thing as well, and may you have some of that, O Peter!
Re: ... the bit that got missed
Date: 2004-02-07 08:50 pm (UTC)As a note, no one actually understands quantum physics. If someone says that they understand it, they are either lying, or insane.
As a further note, to get a feel for quantum physics, imagine if Hressh-Huu was the goddess of all things smaller than a gain of sand, instead of air and weather.
-Tau
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 01:29 pm (UTC)In my world, books are flat and rectangular, usually taller than they are wide (if you're familiar with the Golden Ratio, that's a rough idea of the shape). They consist of paper made from wood pulp, or sometimes a combination of wood and cloth. The paper is either sewn or glued to a binding made of paper or cardboard; if cardboard, it is usually wrapped in cloth. Either the binding or a separate paper wrapping is decorated in some way, often with a picture of either the author or a scene from the book. The printing inside is usually black, though there may be multi-colored illustrations. Both sides of the paper are used.
Long works (both fiction and reference books) are sometimes printed in more than one volume.
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 05:07 pm (UTC)... quiet for normal people and LOUD for the hard of hearing.
[sorry, just couldn't resist :))) ]
Peace
peter
Re: To put it as absurdly as possible...
Date: 2004-02-06 06:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-06 12:37 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-06 06:31 pm (UTC)um...
actually it's the Water-Tree universe. Never mind that.
books
Date: 2004-02-06 09:06 pm (UTC)Naturally I'm more interested in learning about where you live, than explaining what's plain and ordinary to me. I suppose we're both exotic to one another.
Re: books
Date: 2004-02-07 02:45 am (UTC)