I love fonts...and have a special weakness for fonts of well done, unusual alphabets.

Is it any wonder that I love "Elvish" Quenya fonts based on Tolkien's work?

Just for the halibut, I looked up what Amber is in Quenya...its Malikon. And converting to tengwar (the elvish writing system)...we get the graphic you should see below.

"Killing Time", all too real.

In Caleb Carr's SF novel Killing Time, the protagonists perpetuated a number of false and strange revisions to the historical record (like a somewhat benign 1984-ish rewriting) in order to bring light upon the fact that, in this 21st century, corporations had far too much control over media, and therefore our perception of who and what we were.

That's what I thought about today when I read this.
http://www.locusmag.com/2002/News/News03Log.html

The revelation? That Issac Asimov, inarguably one of the giants of SF, died from complications of...AIDS. He apparently had gotten the disease in a blood tranfusion during surgery in 1983. Somehow,t his has the capacity to shock me...and I am disappointed that it was hidden for so long.

It makes me wonder just what else is out there.

Speaking of linking and Blogs and stuff, decided to get BJS linked over at MIT's Blogdex, which is a compedium of sorts of all kinds of Blogs.

I'm not the first in our community to do this, apparently, because when I got it validated and looked at the entry for my Blog, I found that there
was a Blog in its index already with a link to here--Wendi Frost's as it turns out, and she linked to me on December 6th, 2001. That's when my page first
became visible to them, and now, of course, BJS is officially a part of its constellation of linked Blog webpages.

I guess all of this nonsense today is a compound of a rainy day off. I really need to work on Ambercon and other stuff.

Interesting idea I came across today, showcasing how the book The Tipping Point actually applies to Blogs, as well.

And Ginger seems to have gotten wrapped up in the writer's experiments and thoughts on the subject. (her regular Blog, not her gaming
one). But go ahead and
read Corante's article to understand what I mean.

If I understand the concepts correctly (haven't read the actual book myself yet) its possible, as Blogs evolve, that they will become THE dominant medium in
the Amber community for disseminating and exploring new information. (See, I managed an Amber reference in this after all).

A malformed idea

I was toying with using a new variant on sorcery for one of my characters at ACUS...but it turned out to be too much grief for the GM(s), especially given that the game is not a campaign or the like. Not to mention that the variant itself is ill formed and overlaps with other powers (namely Trump) too much. It just turned out to be too much work all around. In a classic mood of mine, I feel bad that I wasted their time with it.

But I figure I would include it here, since maybe someone reading this can get inspired, or whatever. Or just proof of Sturgeon's Law...99% of everything is crap...including my ideas.

Gate Sorcery
Pre Requisites: Sorcery, and Conjuration
(10 points)

Gate Sorcery is the advanced and applied study of non-euclidean connections between locales. In the generic sense, these are referred to as Gates. Gates have a wide range of possibilities, ranging from a simple spell, to faerie rings, to artifacts. The Gate Sorcerer has made a special study and extended ability in dealing with, using, and manifesting Gates.

Abilities

Gate Recognition. By an application and extension of magical senses similar to Mage Sight, the Gate Sorcerer (hereafter referred to as GS) can recognize Gates in any form, because of their attunement to the potential or actual passage of energies between locales. Thus, even if never confronted with one before, for example, a GS would realize that the ring of stones really has the potential to be a link to Faerie, or that strange archway with runes along its edge in the basement was a portal to somewhere else. The GS, with a few minutes study time, can determine what conditions are needed to activate the Portal.

If the Gate has been recently used, or is in fact active, the GS can tell things about what sort of environment lies on the far side without passing through, because of their attunement to such phenomena. The GS will also roughly know how far away the other side of the Gate lies. For example, they might recognize that the other side is a stone room, underground, only a few shadows away...but would not know that, out of sight, a man is standing with a crossbow waiting for a target to emerge.

Note that this does NOT give the GS any additional ability to activate or use the Gate--whatever conditions or restrictions are placed upon its use still apply. They might know, for example, that the Faerie ring requires a sprig of mistletoe to activate, but being a GS does not allow them to get around that necessity.

Gate Creation
The GS can construct Gates themselves. Permanent Gates require a permanent power source of some sort, and may not be possible in, say, Amber, because of corrosive effects of Pattern. Gates can be constructed out of any appropriate materials, shapes and sizes, and would be equivalent to items which rack and use named and numbered spells--and, if not connected to a power source, would be rechargable just as an item with spell storage is. If a Gate has multiple possible destinations, then the locations must be defined in advance via the spells charged into it. Any other property of the Gate must be defined at the time of creation--such as frequency of use, restrictions on those allowed into it, and so forth.

Instead of physically building a gate and empowering it with spells, of course the GS could conjure the entire lock,stock and barrel...but note that such a spell would be time consuming to create, considering it would be a spell for a conjured item on top of spells to empower the Gate.

Gates which are intended to be two-way require two constructions, of course, one at origin and one at destination. Multiple networks require however number of Gates that are required. Otherwise, a Gate works one way only.

Note:
Note that Gate Sorcery is still a magical ability, not a primal power, at its core, and suffers from all of the limitations thereof. Gates which are completely conjured suffer all of the disadvantages and weaknesses of conjured objects. Gate spells are still susceptible to dispels and the like.