Welcome to Alexandria, city of dreams!

This is our initial project. I first posted this on textboard but I'll be using it for the initial piece itt. Let's see what a bunch of wizards can do with it. Good luck, don't be shy and let's try have some fun.

=


When I first arrived in Alexandria, people were concerned about a deep gorge slaves found while constructing the foundations of a builing. The smell, they said and indeed I could sense it when I arrived, was awful, like a mortifying stench of a million men vomiting all the contents of their stomachs night and day nonstop. One could not walk around the streets without a heavy piece of cloth over one's nose and mouth. All windows around town were closed and people were thin and sickly looking for their appetite was mostly gone, like my own. At night we could hear wailing coming from the Vomiting Gorge (that's how people called it then) and none of the locals would dare come near it.
There was a strange movement around town during those days. Alexandria's locals would abandon their homes and lands as they couldn't live near the gorge anymore and many would kill themselves, hanging on trees or anywhere high enough. You couldn't step out of your door without seeing a smiling cadaver. It's true what they said, everyday wheelbarrows filled with suiciders would parade around town, sometimes whole families would vanish this way. At first the king ordered graves to be dug for each person, then one for each family, then mass graves and finally, because the work would take a lot of men and men unwilling, and because the earth in this region is hard and packed, people began tossing all the corpses into the gorge itself.
Many saw this as a dangerous act. We did in fact knew nothing about the gorge then. Dropping dead bodies into the chasm was, it's true, a contributing factor to our doom later on. Others saw as an act of justice. There was a lot of talk about the dead ones, that it couldn't be considered suicide at all but murders carried on by the miasma coming out of the gorge, traveling around town like an invisible horror, making people mad and sick. A lot of people were leaving town and for good reason, but we also got lots of pilgrims, weirdly enough. People would come from all parts of the crumbling empire to visit the famous Vomiting Gorge. Later on it became a known pilgrimage destination point. Men and succubi would come all dressed in black with their heads covered in rags and pray on location, each to a different god or gods. They called it the throad of gods. The land itself began to die and nothing woud grow within several Lessa around it. That's when the King ordered to be sealed shut. Little did we know that was only the beginning of our problems.

In spite of the fact that the king set guard over the perimeter of the sinister place, pilgrims continued to reach the gorge. Of the entire city guard, only a few agreed to patrol there, and among themselves they decided that four people would be enough to carry the watch at night. Whatever the devilish essence hovered over that cleft, everyone clearly felt that it intensifies with the onset of twilight. And only at night there were sounds near it. The guards tried to stay away, only occasionally looking there through the gaps between the buildings.
So people in dark robes more often managed to make their way there at night. And strangely, none of them returned… until that nightmarish night, after which the guards agreed to carry the watch no further than the outskirts of the city.
At first they heard groans, wheezing. Bleating. They looked into the alley, and saw nothing but shadows crawling in the darkness.
Then came a light from the fire. Illuminated the figures, huddled around it, and when they stepped aside, the creature making all those sounds became visible.
In appearance, it was a child sitting on a goat. His whole body was charred. Only stumps sticking out of his shoulders. Somehow, an umbilical cord remained, dragging along the ground, while the goat slowly walked around the gorge.
And his skull was on fire. The figures waited for the child to pass by them and brought candles to it. When all of them had lit candles, they slowly began to diverge in different directions and disappear into the alleys.
The creature continued to scream unintelligible words and moving in circles around the pit.
The guards fled, and as the last of them stumbled on his way out of this nightmare, he heard "Mother!" among the groans and screams.

The cobalt-blue walls of the royal dining hall were lined with intricate gold patterns to compliment the many opulent, jewel encrusted chandeliers. The mighty room was built in line with the holy meridian discovered centuries ago by Alexandria's great cartographers. At the north head of the central table stood a beautiful gold throne that stretched skywards the height of ten men, adorn with rubies and sapphires and carvings of symbols that got more sacred as you got higher up. Slumped right at the bottom of it was the King of Alexandria, head on hand, utterly miserable.

"I saw summora dem cloaked jokers skulking about the courtyard last night". The voice came from the court jester, a disgusting little man wilding a sceptre, which he waved under the King's nose.
"Carrying a whole dead cow between 'em too, I watched 'em, and they still managed to get past your stupid guards". The King said nothing.
"You don't 'spect…" the fool scanned the crowd dramatically (a priest, the head guard and two nobles all huddled around the north end of the massive table avoiding each others gaze)
"You don't 'spect it's more pagans do you?"
"Who else would it bloody be" the king spat into the table.
The old priest, who had attended countless meetings with the King and his fool before, thought it best to interject.
"Well say this gorge is becoming a beacon for heathen worship. The church has dealt with barbarians before. With a little extra funding we could launch a campaign to end this stupid fad in a week. Temporary lapse of royal power is normal you know. Those churls can't even agree on a god, let alone launch an insurrection".
"Wot kinda lapse is that, shortknob? Lest ye ferget, Sire is the great great great great great great great great great grandson of the primordial architect wot was birthed from the sacred ooze and rules over all life, ent ya Lord?"
The King eyed the jester scathingly.
"In any case… we need to do something about the demon rumours. Albin, you said even some of your men got caught up in the hysteria? Eventually I want to send science expeditions down the gorge, once we get Hellensgard or one of the other academic provinces on our side. For now I want the city under quarantine. Turn away any pilgrims and arrest any emigres. I will not have Alexandria known as the portal to false worlds."

I'm sure we all have our opinions on wizchan, but that doesn't reduce the quality of a good thread or discredit the small cabal of interesting posters who show up from time to time. What you just read was a thread that fell off the end of the /hob/ board to make space for fatter goblins. I'm hoping that maybe we can continue it here, but if not then at least this exists as an archive. Not included in the archive is some guy calling OP a fag.

Oh, also >>1 and >>2 were both in the OP, a fact which is completely inconsequential but will bug me if I don't mention it. Damn character limits.

The Art of The Deal was pretty comfy

I'm working through the Simon & Schuster Handbook for Writers. It's got a pretty fun tone and lots of exercises.

I've neglected any serious mathematical/computational activity for nearly a year. I'm going to try to get back into it by (re-)reading Concrete Mathematics.

I read Paul Graham's On Lisp. It gave me a better understanding of macros, and examples of how to pile abstraction layers on top of each other to build amazing stuff. It also dispelled my doubts and showed me that Common Lisp really isn't for me - I'm more of a Scheme person.

More recently, I read O'Reilly's Network Warrior. Being familiar only with home/SOHO networking equipment, I feared it'd be out of my league, but instead I found a very accessible book, that explains all the required background without patronizing the reader or dumbing things down, crammed with useful info both theoretical and practical. If you're interested, try to get the second edition, as the first has a fair number of errata.

And now I really should be getting back to SICP sometime soon.

...!

No, it's a moderately sized imageboard. 4chan and 8chan are just lightning fast

It's actually very fast compared to most other imageboards.

This. Most imageboards float between one post per day and one post per month

Not even close. It's surprisingly active.

>>1
Science fiction, I meant.

>>1
There aren't any?

My mother has loads of collections of fairy tales from across the world that I enjoyed as a kid. If you're talking about sword and sorcery stuff, I can't really help you.

>>1
I hear that Lord Dunsany is fairly good.

Joe Abercrombie's The First Law series is pretty good.

DIE MONSTER, YOU DONT BELONG IN THIS WORLD!

>>4
something something, ten years worth of cum flowed into asuna

>>4
We are the kids in America

>>7
Digimon is my favorite novel.

>>2
this is actually hilariousu

Except now, capitalists have made the internet nearly as bland as television. So there's no difference, anymore. It's all consumption, again.

>>2
Foster: 1
>>1: 0

The internet only changed things for a few people, for a few decades. Now things are back to normal, since religious people invaded the internet, and having fun is a sin, and using anything other than your Real Name (Governmentally Approved) is a sin too.

twitter, facebook et. al may all suck terribly and be intensly corporate, commodified, and manipulative, but you have to admit they're still extremely different from television.
"social media" engineered for attention/emotional vampirism("engagement") takes the form of interactive game systems. its a very different style of consumption that involves participation and has a different effect on peoples psyche and how they come to socialize and relate to each other than watching shows interrupted with ads on TV.
so even if its right that the internet didnt/wouldnt make everything great by itself its still a failure to think it wouldnt change all that much.

Try "Is Literary History Possible?" by Perkins.

This is exactly what I've been doing with Don Quixote. And it's a great book, I've just been reading it since December. About a third of the way into the second book, I'm liking it a lot.
The Three Musketeers are on my list, too, since I'm reading the classics. But I think I'll read Moby-Dick next.

I just finished Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants and Yukio Mishima's Death in Midsummer short story collections by reading on my lunch break.

>>5
It's holding my interest. What types of books do you typically read?
It's probably heavily up to taste.

>>6
Science fiction, fantasy, mythology, textbooks, articles on math and science, etc.
I should probably go into Dune treating it as fantasy rather than scifi, and then it'll be OK.

>>7
It's an Epic. And it's a good one.
Unbearably bad is a complete overreaction, considering the fact that many consider it a classic. You either think it's great, or you think it's bad. "Unbearably bad" is too much.
It is good, you just need to actually try it.

And I just finished Dune. I liked it. I can see why it's a classic.
Now I'll look into the sequels and some other sci-fi.

>>9
>other sci-fi
Jack McDevitt has a lotta great books, mostly in two series, about different forms of sci-fi archaeology in space.

I've been watching it, and really like it.

bernard appeals to my inner (and outer) smug superiority over others, and best girl has objectively great taste in books. I was surprised they managed to wring as many jokes out of the concept and time allotment as they did, i had to pause it a few times to catch up.

looks gay

I just watched the whole thing yesterday. I enjoyed it! It made me feel more well-read.

My grandpa let me have/borrow this really nice edition of the Book of Proverbs published by Heritage Press. He has over a hundred of these Heritage Press books, they're all excellently made. I wish I knew of a publisher around today that made such nice books. They also published the Book of Psalms, next time I visit I'll ask if he has that.

>>34
>best scholars of the time
And the best scholars of today have more resources than the best scholars of his day.
>Ah, the classic "grades > education" approach. Will the world ever recover from this?
Sadly, probably not until the school system itself is abolished. Since my high school also used the tactic of assigning a lot of homework, to raise the grades of kids who could cheat on homework but couldn't cheat on (and therefore got bad grades on) tests, I, since I don't do well with busywork, got very low GPAs in high school, and thus my high school is one of the major reasons I didn't get into any decent colleges, despite perfect test scores on many standardised tests.
>That's not really a good thing
Ah, so freedom and individualism are bad things.
>means people can rationalize whatever they want to without remorse
Correct, but most people won't rationalise murder. It's not in anyone's best interest to do that anyway. How can people keep freedom if they take away the freedom of others?
>What's to stop someone from killing if they feel killing is right?
What stops people today? Nothing. The legal system punishes people after they do bad things: the legal system never prevents bad things from happening. It's reactive, not proactive.
The best hope to stop this is to make sure everyone has his own gun and reacts fast enough to stop murders before they occur. The same thing that works today, since as said before, the legal system prevents nothing.
>What? The OT is Jewish, I'll give you that, but the NT (which is the basis for Christianity) is totally ignored by Jews. It was even written in Greek.
But just as English language VNs are often written by wapanese, the NT was written by people who saw inspiration in semitic culture when inventing a new religion.
>(Also, I don't mean to get political, but "Aryan" and "Western" are not the same thing. The Greeks, for example, were not Aryan.)
I specifically used that word, even though I don't use it often. If you use the word Western, you have to agree with who you're talking about whether semites are Western or not. You can see semites, judaism, christianity, and islam as western or not western. But all four of those things hold the same values. And those four things are at conflict with a free Europe.
>Maybe I'm a pessimist, or maybe I'm just in a bad area, but this is not what I've seen. It all depends on one's perspective.
I think that most people are taught to be bad, and aren't born bad. Very few people might be ``naturally'' bad but they've been quite effective in forcing or teaching others to be bad.

>>35
>And the best scholars of today have more resources than the best scholars of his day
It's not so much a matter of resources as it is intelligence and knowledge of the craft (poetry and writing). The best writers of the past cannot be said to be less talented just because they're older.
>my high school is one of the major reasons I didn't get into any decent colleges, despite perfect test scores on many standardised tests
That's ridiculous, I'm sorry to hear that. In my high school homework wasn't even mandatory.
>Ah, so freedom and individualism are bad things
I never said that. I think that they are good things to a point, just like most other things. Moral relativisim is freedom and individualism taken to a destructive fault.
>Correct, but most people won't rationalise murder
Maybe true, but they could rationalize theft or other crimes. It's easy to do that when you're stealing from a business that "already makes a bunch of money." People are primarily motivated by selfish desire, at least until they realize how toxic those desires can be. This is a central "thesis" of the Bible, and I'd say it holds true beyond the scope of Christianity.
>the legal system never prevents bad things from happening
Do you not think the rate of petty theft would rise if it were no longer illegal? The "reactive" punishment is also, in part, proactive. Not many people want to be punished. It's the same way we learn about right and wrong as children.
>the NT was written by people who saw inspiration in semitic culture when inventing a new religion
You're right, I'll concede on this point.

Anyway, we're getting a bit off track here. Perhaps we should make a debate board for these arguments.

>>36
>Perhaps we should make a debate board for these arguments.
>>>/bol/

The bible is super inconsistent, it's like it's its own fanfiction.

>>19
>musical flow
Yes, this!
>Everyone thinks they can write free verse, after all.
Everyone can. After abstract art came into being, hasn't art become subjective?
>taking psychoactive drugs
Bad life choice, really. Instead of adapting to drugs, adapt yourself to a life without drugs: cold turkey.

>never enjoyed fantasy
Interesting, why not? And it's cool you believe it's going well!
>It's all quite allegorical and might end up being hamfisted
Better to get your point across too much rather than not at all. Though I certainly prefer art for art's sake rather than art as simply a tool for delivering meaning. But both can be fine if done well.
>How are everyone's projects going?
Mine's not going at all. I just need to /quit IRC and vidya and start typing my ideas up!

>>20
>Everyone can. After abstract art came into being, hasn't art become subjective?
Of course, anyone can make art, and I believe anyone can benefit from it too. However, this loosening of the formerly rigid standards/conventions for art (meter for poetry, representation for visual arts, etc.) carries some unpleasant consequences.
Consider this: The average consumer of art is not familiar with the theory behind the craft. As such, his view of quality is likely to be informed by what he can see on the surface. In the case of contemporary poetry, these traits include line breaks (often in jarring positions), imagery, sentence fragments, and a lack of clear "message." These techniques can be very easily emulated, leading prospective poets to believe that, since they "already know how to write poetry" and there are "no rules," they can go ahead and begin publishing their work—there is no rigorous standard (at least, on the surface) against which they might be judged. Granted, there has always been bad poetry. However, because free verse has been popularized, and the public believes that there are "no rules" in art, this imitation circulates without issue or complaint, thus perpetuating the cycle. One name that comes to mind is Rupi Kaur.
Postmodernism, and its applications in the art world, is certainly justified philosophically. But what comes from it is a disregard for high culture and beauty, and that is enough to demonstrate to me that it is not worth following. Toxic fruit comes from a toxic tree. I could get into the political motivations for these trends as well, but I fear that may be pushing the bounds of this thread a bit too far.
>Bad life choice, really.
For you, sure. I'm not proud to be on drugs, but I just finished a year without them and my life was markedly worse despite all my efforts to improve myself. There comes a point at which the brain needs a bit of help. Maybe one day I'll be able to manage myself better, but for now I need that help.
>fantasy
It feels like escapism to me. The depth of the world we live in is beyond staggering, and I'm content to explore that. Then again, maybe I've just never read a fantasy book good enough to change my mind.
>I certainly prefer art for art's sake rather than art as simply a tool for delivering meaning
My goal is to blend those two, though it is very important to me to deliver meaning. But I guess I'm willing to sacrifice on the first bit if it means I can more communicate with others.
>/quit IRC and vidya
No more slacking! Get to work! Chop chop!

>>21
>But what comes from it is a disregard for high culture and beauty
I disagree. Modern and classic art can and do coexist.
>I could get into the political motivations for these trends as well, but I fear that may be pushing the bounds of this thread a bit too far.
I made /bol/ for a reason.
>But I guess I'm willing to sacrifice on the first bit if it means I can more communicate with others.
Well, if your intent is to communicate any "deeper" or "bigger" meaning, the first part was already 100% sacrificed. It's a mutually exclusive situation, though I really don't dislike either: I just have a preference.
Van Gogh's paintings of trees are beautiful because there are trees and brushstrokes, not because there's a meaning to them. Same with most other paintings that are enjoyed for being beautiful. The same dichotomy exists in writing. Some things are written to be wonderful!

>>22
>Modern and classic art can and do coexist
Yeah, but only one philosophical/aesthetic foundation is "valid" within contemporary art: postmodernism. Styles and movements of the past are no longer relevant in today's art world.
>I made /bol/ for a reason
Ah, maybe I'll make a thread there later for discussions-gone-awry. Good call.
>if your intent is to communicate any "deeper" or "bigger" meaning, the first part was already 100% sacrificed
Why do you think this is so? There is "bigger" and "deeper" meaning to many important literary works, and yet they don't suffer aesthetically. This is true for works as old as those of Homer, as well as those of modernists like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. Only in postmodern fiction is this search for meaning ridiculed. And yet, the best and most loved postmodern authors (I'm thinking Gaddis, Pynchon, Delillo) still imbued their work with many layers of secondary meaning—however obfuscated those may be. (Yeah, yeah, death of the author. You get what I mean, though.)
I don't mean to namedrop for appearances. Just wanted to provide concrete examples.

>>23
>There is "bigger" and "deeper" meaning to many important literary works, and yet they don't suffer aesthetically.
I disagree. Stories written as a tool rather than written for the story themselves suffer greatly.
There is no deeper or bigger meaning in anything Homer. Saying there is is to lie, to create fiction, to create something that isn't there. The two works attributed to homer are just great epics and myths. Action stories. And action stories can be good.
>death of the author
Yeah, I consider death of the author to be unfortunate. I think that your own opinion is the second-most important in the world. The author's is the most important opinion.

>>30
Thanks, man.

Anyone have Moby-Dick?

>>32
Public domain.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2701

>>33
Thanks.

>>2
Do you have a version with spacing?

>>65
Thank you for the explanation, that sounds really fascinating. Funny to note that the same things that had made Lindbergh so popular (cult of personality, enemy as political opportunity) have been decried as "fascist" in Trump's case.

>>65
>He also is far more subtle than Trump about his anti-Semitic agenda, working with a prominent rabbi to form a government agency called the Office of American Absorption with a positive-sounding mission to integrate Jews into American society.
>implying Trump is anti-Semitic
He completely supports Israel, and has the support of Israel's leader. Many of his kids are converted Jews. He's not anti-Semitic, or, at least, he's great at hiding it.
>And his administration is competent.
Trump's administration isn't that bad.

I didn't mean to imply that Trump is anti-Semitic, but I see how my wording was ambiguous. I was contrasting Lindbergh's anti-Semitism with Trump's attacks on Islam.

>Trump's administration isn't that bad.

bad thread

>>70
who are you to decide this?