The will generated the power to accomplish the work of the spell. Magic, after all, is little more than human will imposed upon the world, forcing the world to change. The precision was required to actually perform the spell, which in casting looked something like an impressionistic dance: precise, twitchy movements accompanied by precise, arpeggaited nonsense syllables. None of it was actaully nonsense though: one twitch misplaced, one word mispronounced, and the whole spell was wrong. When dealing with the kind of spell the casting of which allowed a wizard to afford a tower, even the most trivial error was often fatal.

Incidentally, most people are familiar with Merlin, the last of the great casters of the old style. He was a genius, to be sure, and was instrumental in uniting Britain. However, in the popular imagination, his prowess has eclipsed his actual accomplishments. Few people remember that the lowest 12 stories of his tower were occupied by his support staff, who did most of the work of actually inventing the grand spells that he cast. He was the performer, and an exceptional one; he was the manager, and talented at it. They were just the writers, but without them he would have been a gun without bullets. All his most famous sorceries were ghostwritten.

The Djinni of Arabia, the faculty of the research university of al-Djinn, had been advancing the world’s understanding of magic for centuries. In an inversion of European norms, the faculty themselves were the researchers and writers; they used slaves to cast the spells they wrote. They’d discovered compulsion spells as early as the 9th century AD, but it took another four centuries before anyone figured out how to make them useful: on their face, they were more complicated and more trouble to cast than simply paying someone to do whatever work would have been compelled.

The key to the revolution wasn’t immediately obvious: an efficiency improvement which allowed anyone who could cast a cantrip to at least begin a compulsion. Even then, the meticulous precision with which the actions to be performed had to be described couldn’t make compulsion cost-efficient for industrial purposes. Upon this discovery Abara Adaba, the researcher in charge of the project, lost his grant and turned to other projects.

Two years later, he made history by casting on himself a compulsion to read a given magical text, memorize it, then perform it exactly as written. The resulting spell–one which endowed an ordinary carpet with flight–had been until that moment tremendously expensive: it generally killed dozens of slaves attempting to cast it before one managed to get it right. Adaba rode his magic carpet straight into the history texts as the innovator who introduced the Industrial Age.

The US Army celebrates Columbus Day with a four-day weekend, which would be a suspicious use of time if it didn’t work to my advantage.

Mostly, I’ve been up to a whole lot of relaxation. Last week my sleep schedule was getting bad to the point of inducing insanity, and it was a huge relief just to get caught up some. I visited a friend for a few hours of anime, viewed and reviewed a few series I hadn’t seen before, and read a novel or three. I’ve made fairly substantial improvements to my webcomic scraping software, such that even new comics with weird formats and multiple images per page take only a few minutes of configuration before my software can handle them correctly. The benefit of having this software is that with a local, hyperlinked copy of the comic, I don’t have to wait for the image to load. In the past, the coding time involved made this worthwhile only for comics with large archives and slow page-load times (hey megatokyo!), but it’s at this point it’s becoming worth it for pretty much any comic with more than a dozen pages of archives.

In conjunction with all this, I finally got high-speed broadband set up. I’ve had basic DSL set up for most of a month, but in this context, ‘basic’ means ‘we constrict your bandwidth to 100k/s down, or 16 simultaneous sockets open.’ It was actually the issues with concurrent connections which made it unacceptable; I torrent a lot (of completely legal stuff, of course), and even checking my email became nearly impossible due to the crazy timeouts. Now, I’ve got a 5mbps cable connection which seems to have no trouble with all the simultaneous connections I throw at it, and I am happier.

The last thing I’ve done is discover and listen to All the beatles albums ever released in the UK, sequentially, in just over an hour. This is possible through digital technology, which allows us to listen to music at eight times its natural tempo. In theory I could decompress it and chop it up and have artifacty versions of all these songs for my personal use, but in practice, that’s way too much effort; it’s not worth my time investment. What the music actually most reminds me of is when you get to the high levels in Tetris, only with demented vocalists churning along just as fast.

My great-grandfather on my mother’s mother’s side was the only member of that generation of my family to live long enough for me to meet. He was born over a hundred years ago, and helped shape the landscape of modern New Hampshire–sometimes quite literally: my hometown, his town, has six exits on the interstate highway, while a few miles down the road a city twice the size has three. My point here is that my heritage is unambiguously American; though my ancestors immigrated from England and France, nobody in my family has actually lived there for over a century.

I’d consider myself pro-immigration: the only reason to limit immigration is to limit access to social services which an immigrant has not spent their life paying for, and I’m anti-social-services (in general–talk to me for details). If we do away with most governmental services, we can open immigration policies without taking a financial hit.

However, I see no reason why a court should be required to hire interpreters for people, or why official documents must be translated into “major” languages. Equality under the law doesn’t mean providing assistance until every citizen is functionally equal; it means treating them the same no matter their background. I don’t expect copies of the law of Japan to be translated into English for me; I don’t see why a Mexican (or any other non-English-speaking) immigrant to the US would expect a similar service. Those are convenient services which are beneficial to immigrants, but they are expenses the government has to pay, and they still don’t ensure equality: even if we provide translations into dozens of languages, there are still hundreds more languages spoken within the US.

I’d say that it is advantageous for a nation to promote the use of a single language within its borders, because it eliminates barriers which would otherwise fragment its citizens. Eliminating those internal linguistic barriers helps promote a sense of being one nation, and one people; it builds a sense of nationalism. One of the best ways to institutionally promote unity is to make other options inconvenient; even without making anything illegal or impossible, people will gravitate towards the easy option. Less than one percent of the population of the US speaks no English; choosing and enforcing that language as an official standard will reduce that fraction further, not by driving people out of the country, but by encouraging them to learn.

One of the favorite metaphors of America’s immigrant heritage is the melting pot. As I understand it, this was supposed to evoke the image of a steel forge, radiant with heat as the alloys formed. The original materials–the iron, the coke, the other ingredients–never survive unscathed with their culture and heritage intact. However, when they emerge, they have combined into something altogether better than what was put in: steel.

It was about a year ago, now, that my parents approached me with a remarkable proposition: if I could find a job in Japan, they would pay for my airfare. I had already decided that it would be pretty cool to live and work in Japan for a while, but I had no sort of definite timeline; the idea was that it would happen after I got sick of my first job. Their proposal suddenly turned my previously nebulous ambition into a concrete plan, and it was way too awesome to turn down. I ended up with a job that I feel like I lucked into, not just because of the transportation windfall, but because it is almost a parody of what I might have described as a perfect job, in college: I never have to wake up before noon, I work about 20 hours per week, and I have no trouble at all making ends meet.

Despite all that, the job is not perfect. My main complaint is that I live in the middle of nowhere; I am in a town too small to have a train station, and in Japan that’s saying something. Put otherwise, this town has approximately the same population as the one I grew up in (30,000 people), so I naively expected the same sort of commercial infrastructure: a library, a mall, a variety of restaurants, a movie theatre or two, and a main street with a number of miscellaneous shops. Instead, there are exactly 14 stores in this town: 2 grocery stores, 3 hair salons, 2 clothing stores, 4 restaurants (one is devoted to ramen, and another to udon), and a few miscellaneous shops. To get to a library I have a half hour bike ride ahead of me. To get to a movie theatre, I have the same length ride, plus another half hour on a train.

In other words, when I have exhausted the Internet and computer games bore me, I can be stuck with literally nothing to do unless I’m willing to spend at least an hour on my bicycle. Worse, businesses around here tend to close around 2200. If I want to find some entertainment after work (I usually get out of work sometime around 2100), there is almost nothing I can do without going all the way to Tokyo. This just isn’t worth it, mainly because the trains stop running around midnight.

The time will come in a month or two that I have to decide whether or not to renew my contract and teach here for another year. There is definitely a temptation to do just that, and essentially coast. I recently received my first performance feedback (after only 7 months!); the comments from the parents’ day some months ago. Somewhat to my surprise, it was almost universally positive. On the other hand, teaching is not my chosen career; it is something I am doing because of extraneous benefits. More to the point, I am somewhat dubious already about the value of my degree as a job enabler in a field in which every “entry-level” job listing seems to want 3-5 years of development experience; with each passing month not gaining experience, my ability to find jobs in the field diminishes further.

My options, then, seem to be as follows:

1. Just renew the contract and worry about the future later. The pro is that there is essentially no effort involved. I even get a raise that, over the course of the year, will add up to an additional two weeks’ salary. On the down side, I have to live here for another year.
2. Not renew the contract here, but transfer within the company instead. The benefits are that I get to keep the raise, and I get to live somewhere else. On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that I lucked into quite literally the best job this company has to offer; if I went anywhere else within the company, at best, I’d have to work a lot more. Furthermore, with only a few exceptions, I kind of like the students that I have; in particular, the adult students comprise just about my only social contacts, and I am deeply grateful for their friendliness. I would feel bad leaving them to go teach another group who will likely be less fun.
3. There exist IT jobs for people with minimal Japanese who happen to be living in Japan; what immediately caught my attention was the fact that out of four such jobs that I found in half an hours’ browsing, the minimum salary offered was 2.3 times my current, and the average was 3.5. I understand that the cost of living in Tokyo will offset those gains, but I do want to live in a big city at some point, and Tokyo is about as big as they get. The main trouble is that I’m worried about actually procuring such a job. When I was looking for this job, I examined a few hundred job listings and sent applications to about 40 before this one accepted me. The number of IT jobs around here for which I am qualified are dramatically fewer, and I don’t want to be stuck jobless in Japan if I do turn down the contract.
4. I could end the Japan thing and look for programming jobs in the US; I have no doubt that I could turn up something. On the other hand, it feels too soon; I have a few ideas about when it would be right to leave Japan (my student loans are fully paid off, or I become fluent in Japanese, for example) and none of them seem likely to happen before this contract expires.
5. I could try for grad school. I’d be limited there to English-speaking countries (my Japanese just isn’t up to par for actually learning things), but that’s not actually a huge limiting factor. It’s more appealing than leaving Japan and heading directly into another job, but less so than just staying in Japan.

Of these options, I like #3 the best. In the end, I’m sure I will have to decide for myself, and if I can bully myself into being the person I want to be, I will go for the third option. However, these decisions are not made in a vacuum; I’ve laid out my options because I want to hear what you people think about my options, and whatever recommendations you have.

It’s also in the public record that I live in New England, which tends to be a fairly ethnically homogenous area. So, in any given group of kids, maybe 1 or 2 in 30 will be black, a rare person of asian descent, and the rest are straight from europe.

Finally, I’d like to say that I hope that I lack racial prejudices; I like to consider myself a modern, enlightened person who judges people on their own merits instead of their skin.

So, why is it that, with rare exceptions, every black kid I’ve ever had to deal with seems to be actively trying to reinforce negative stereotypes? Almost always, they’re the ones who are the troublemakers, the belligerent ones, the ones the counselors warn each other about because they’re hard to deal with? This isn’t to say that there aren’t white kids who act equally poorly, just that–and mind you, I don’t especially like drawing this distinction–the white problem kids (that I’ve met) are only maybe 10% of the population, and the black problem kids tend to be closer to 80 or 90% of the ones I’ve met.

Today was the first day I worked at an elementary school; I’ll be working there for the next three or so weeks. So, the other counselors were telling me about the various kids, who I should look out for, who tends to cry and who’s always getting scraped up. There were several kids who they said would be a handful, but are typically manageable. But as the kids started filing in, only one had his backpack in a garbage bag carried by the guidance counselor, with the accompanying story that he had taken to leaving it about the school in various places because he had discovered that it disrupted classes. The most recent place it was found was in the urinal, damp.

It belonged to the one black kid in the group.

Last summer, as a camp counselor, similar circumstances: a tiny percentage of black kids among the overwhelmingly caucasian majority. Jr. High and High School age kids. I disagreed with many campers, but only one ever tried to start brawling with me. A black kid. Many people complained about the mountains while hiking the appalacian trail, but only one faked an injury to hold us up so he could rest for a while. A (different) black kid. How do I know the injury was faked? He was bragging about it later, on the ride back.

Is it that they feel some compulsion to be the ‘bad boy,’ to be stronger and tougher and more out of control than their peers? Is it some twisted sense of black pride which says that to maintain respect, they’ve got to defy whatever the white guy says?

I wish that I could say I was just leaving out the rowdy white kids, that I was attaching undue focus on the black kids. But that is not the case. And when I look at articles which cry out against the police and judicial system because the prison population is primarily black, I can’t agree. Because their premise is that every person is equally likely to commit a crime, to simply do what they’ve been told not to, but in my experience as a person expected to enforce Authority, the unfortunate truth is that they aren’t.

I hope that there’s some proof, something that I experience in the future which suggests the opposite, that people of every race are equally likely to shine out or be stupid, because right now, with the experiences I’ve had, I have to come to the conclusion that they aren’t. And this flies in the face of everything I’ve been taught in my life about the nature of people and what constitutes right and just behavior and expectations of a person.

When the clerk of a small store watches black people more carefully than whites, I feel honestly sorry for the good people, who feel harassed and put under pressure because they don’t conform to the stereotype; they’re honest. At the same time, for the storekeeper, it’s simply safer to run things that way, and telling him that he shouldn’t do so would be bad advice.

Which leads to a chicken-and-egg type question: if the kids grow up misbehaving because the stereotypes say they should, and the stereotypes grow out of their misbehavior, how on earth do you get them, collectively, to behave? So that the stereotypes go away because they no longer contain a grain of truth?

Drove a few hours today to Mass, to see my new cousin get circumcised. It’s a ceremony that, as important and holy as it may be, still gives me the jitters. Other than that…

Driving back home, it began to snow. After dinner, my dad and I tried out the new (to us) snowblower, which may as well be a christmas present even though it was never really announced as such. It took off the top six inches without stuttering, and though I expect that we’ll have to go over it again tomorrow morning to get rid of the other six inches, the total effort expended will be much less than if we had tried to attack the snow with shovels. It’s very wet… great for snowmen, denser than sand…

I’m happy. I’m also going to sleep now, in an effort to get back onto a more ‘human’ schedule (as my mother so discretely puts it).

Merry christmas! (this actually does still apply, if you happen to live around England…)

Definitely one of the lesser known of mythical bests, you are described as having the head and legs of a cock, the body of a serpent, and the wings of a bat (although there are wingless varieties). You were the blame of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the middle ages. Your breath and even gaze was deadly. Hundreds of basilisk hunts were organized to get rid of you. The hunters would carry mirrors so that, if they encountered you, they would have you look in the mirror and destroy yourself! Weasels were also reputed to be able to kill you, as they could resist your deadly gaze. You were a potent symbol of death and in some cultures the embodiment of Death himself. In Christianity, the Basilisk was linked with Satan.
What mythical beast best represents you?

Find out what kind of driver you are!

Check it out, man! Dare you even attempt to match my rank in evilness?

Then why is everything I choose either blue or black?

As dictators go, you’re kind of pathetic! Instead of military coup or systematic persecution to get power, you just happen to be the head of the only party in the UK that isn’t totally worthless! While not very impressive it is none the less effective! You can do whatever the hell you like without any chance of getting voted out of office! People know that the only alternative would have them eating their children if they ever got back into power! However, you still think that you are as loved as you were when you were first elected into power… News flash for you: You’re not! What tin-pot dictator are you? Take the “What Dictator am I?” test at PoisonedMinds.com

He’s a dictator?