Oops...

Yeah...

The problem with basing goals on previous goals and previous progress is that sometimes the physical
realities of the work you're doing change so as to make existing standards inapplicable, and sometimes that happens so slowly you don't notice right away. For example, when I first set a goal for handwritten pages, way back in 2019, I was using an A5 notebook with 31 lines to the page. Then I switched to wide-ruled composition books which only have 24 lines to the page and encourage you to write bigger because the lines are wider. So I figured okay, I'll write two lines of text on each line of the page, and still count partials at 31 lines to the page, and the composition book being two inches wider shouldn't really affect anything because the margins are wider too. (Spoiler alert: they are not two inches wider). So now my definition of a "page" is 48 lines, longer lines, but it's fine, yeah? It's fine. And it sorta was?

Then I found some college ruled composition books, which I prefer when I can get them. This should have taken me closer to the original standard - they're 30 lines to the page and still two inches wider than the A5. Trouble is, I've gotten into the habit of squeezing two lines into each line, and I'm not inclined to stop now. So now I'm writing 60 lines on 7.48 inch paper and calling it the same amount of writing as 31 lines on 5.5". Yeah. I doubled the amount of writing I considered a "page" without noticing, because my blog posts kept getting longer to match, and because I don't trust myself not to take an excuse to write less. In recognition of this, I have doubled my accounting of handwritten pages this year, and will be counting pages of college ruled composition books as two pages going forward. (And wide ruled, if I should return to them, as 1.5). The lesson is that while it's important to be vigilant for excuses not to write, you've gotta trust yourself like, a little. 

The problem with completely new goals is that you have no idea what's realistic, or sometimes even whether you're measuring the right thing. In September, spending around 250 hours learning unity, and setting a goal to get about 100 "skills" as measured by their online learning platform, seemed pretty reasonable. 

In the intervening time, I have discovered the following: 1. I am not 236 hours worth of excited about learning to program. 2. I'm not at all sure Unity is well suited to most of what I want to do. 3. The rate at which you gain "skills" slows down over time, and I can't make heads or tails of what it counts. 4. I'd kind of like to try my hand at Pokemon romhacks. 5. There are perfectly good structured python tuturoals out there, I just wasn't good at finding them. 6. Making a Foundry plugin should be just fine, and you do that in like, Java - I don't need to make a dedicated VTT. 

So, the goal I've been calling "Unity time" is gonna be expanded to all time learning programming or game design. And I'm not gonna worry about it too much. We'll see how much I get done and scale subsequent goals off of that. May split it into programming and game design for next year, depending on how much time I end up spending on actually learning to code versus like, coming up with gym leader teams and thinking about user interfaces. For "skills" we're gonna be switching over to counting completed tutorial sections, since those are actually under my control and can be counted cross-platform. The lesson here is that just because you've learned not to spend $200 on supplies when you get a new hobby, that doesn't mean you've learned not to overinvest. 

These changes ought not appreciably alter the rate at which you get new blog posts, so look for Grave Peril Chapter 15 sometime next week. Until then, be gay, do crimes, and read all the things!

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 15

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Ghosts cannot cross thresholds, full stop. Apparently they don't eve have the limited flexibility on that
front that human wizards, vampires, and spirits do, and while a powerful spirit could maybe get across a threshold as strong as the Malones' (which is stronger than Harry's, because it's a house rather than an apartment and because a married couple has made it their permanent home) it wouldn't have been able to work magic while it was there, and should have been restricted to the kind of physical damage that the toad demon inflicted on Harry's apartment in Storm Front. (Or like the Nightmare did to the roses outside St. Mary's, I notice). 

There are basically three ways that what happened could have happened. 

1. A literal God, and not one of the small, obscure ones either. Bob suggests Hecate, Kali, or one of the Old Ones, which is to say like, Cthulu. Gods with active followership and either a lot of believers or substantial fictional representation to help make up the difference. It's worth noting that in this setting, Hecate may also be Mother Winter, or both the Mothers, or all six fairy queens, or maybe just the three queens of winter? Which may make up for her not having as many active believers as Kali, or Cthulu's bestseller status. So that would be bad. Harry doesn't think this is super likely, because the behavior we've seen from the Nightmare has been too small, petty, and personal for a God. It's clearly very angry, but not at the right scale. 

2. It managed to get an invitation into the Malone's house somehow. That would probably mean that it possessed someone, either someone they knew or someone who could convince Mickey they needed help. Harry's best guess is that maybe it possessed Lydia and acted helpless at them, but there's almost no reason to think this other than that she's the only character introduced in this book who's unaccounted for so far. It's just conservation of detail, and makes no actual sense. Harry doesn't, by the way, even think about asking Malone whether anyone unusual came to the door, because this isn't about solving the mystery, it's about keeping Lydia relevant to the story. Also, she's wearing Harry's anti-ghost talisman, so she should be the person least likely to have been possessed. From where I'm standing, it's more likely that Sonia went out to get the newspaper or something, and the Nightmare possessed her, pretended she'd locked herself out so Mickey would let her back in, did the barbed wire spell, and then left her body and messed with her memories. 

This is sort of the beginning of the plot of this book making no sense. There's no explanation for the dead animals in this theory, but whatever. Harry has a 'feeling' about Lydia being involved. This 'feeling' is, as far as I can tell, based on the following. 1. He gave her the talisman, which she did not ask for and which there is no reason to believe she knew he had, and he feels stupid for doing that, which is fair, because he could as easily have kept the bracelet and sent her straight to St, Mary's, as he does with lots of people having ghosty problems in subsequent books. But that's hardly evidence of dark forces at work. 2. She's willing to trade sex for favors, and Harry finds that suspicious for...some reason. (I mean, the reason is misogyny, but I really can't follow the logic on this one like at all.) 3. She's hot, and Harry find that suspicious, which is also fair, but not actually a good basis for action. 4.She was at the church when the Nightmare attacked, which I guess might be evidence for "she knows more than she's letting on", but is the opposite of evidence for "she's in on this with the Nightmare", unless we want to, idk, take some kind of horrible misogynistic position that her obvious terror means she must be in some kind of abusive relationship with the Nightmare, where she might flee from it but it will always have a hold over her. Which I do not. This isn't Phantom of the Opera. Anyway. 

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3. It could be something new, something neither Bob nor Harry has seen before. Bob points this one out, and I think it dovetails interestingly with the possibility I brought up last chapter, that Bob is afraid of this thing because it's unfamiliar. What you don't know is uniquely well situated to eat your face. 

Harry gears up with his force ring and shield bracelet. He's gonna try and use the talisman to track Lydia. Honestly, smarter idea he's had all book. He orders Bob to possess Mister, go out, and talk to his contacts in the spirit would, and not to waste time going through any women's locker rooms. 

Also apparently Bob dated Charybdis at some point? Somehow? 

Sorry this one's a little short and lightweight. This chapter was only seven and a half minutes, much of it pointless, circular argument or wild speculation about Lydia. Jesus of Suburbia is both longer and richer in meaning. Until next time, be gay, do crimes, and read All The Things! 

Dresden Files Reread - Grave Peril Chapter 14

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Back at his apartment, Harry fills Michael in on the events of the day so far: the meeting with Mort and the detour to help Malone, and that as a result, he hasn't had much chance to look for Lydia, although at least Murphy got his car out of impound. When describing the barbed wire spell, Harry says it was wrong, but hesitates to call it evil, although Michael has no similar reservations, and makes a point of reminding Harry that evil exists, as does good. Now, evil isn't a work that Harry throws around all that often. He describes Victor Sells as an "evil sorcerer" once, but that's to some extent just colloquial usage, and in any case, describing a person, who has free will, and has chosen to use it to cause harm, is rather a different proposition from calling a spell evil. The only other appearance of the word "evil" in Storm Front is when Harry observes that the fae, who notably lack free will, aren't evil. However, in Fool Moon, he characterizes the enchantment on the wolf belts as "evil, in the most effective sense of the word." I wonder if he ever talked to Michael about that, ever told him about the wolf belts. Given that it took Harry like two years to fill Michael in on the ongoing situation with Lasciel's coin, I'm guessing he hasn't. That he doesn't want Michael to be disappointed in him. I don't know that Michael would be disappointed - I don't think Harry would have made it through the fight without putting on the belt, and in the end he did take it off, and burned it. 

We know Michael and Harry don't see each other all that often, and there's reason to believe that they've known each other since Harry, at least, was much younger and less thoughtful than he is now, and sometimes I think they have trouble giving each other enough credit. Harry has trouble seeing Michael's capacity for nuance or flexibility, and Michael often responds as though Harry were still as driven by youthful passion and edgy cynicism as he was in the immediate aftermath of Justin's death. I'm sure seventeen year old Harry was fully convinced that there was no such thing as good and evil, and said so, much as Fitz asserted that "there's no such thing as good guys or bad guys, there's just guys". But he's matured since then, and so, I suspect, has Michael - note that he never actually gives the "set aside your evil powers before they corrupt you" speech in the book - but they're not always working with the most up-to-date models of each other. And doesn't Harry give Murphy the "evil does exist" speech like, a few books from now? 

Michael is mildly disapproving of Harry's getting Murphy to break the law to get his car back (although I'm not actually sure there was any lawbreaking involved, it may just have been...favoritism in her use of authority. Harry points out that God doesn't arrange his transport, and Michael says there isn't time to debate it. But then he's all "Isn't that a very positive coincidence?" about Murphy asking the CPD to keep an eye out for Lydia, which is a more substantial, more probably illegal, misapplication of her authority and also a result of Harry's "detour" to help Malone, and I think that might be his way of conceding the point. Not to say that it's okay, at baseline, for Murphy to bend the law to help Harry, but that perhaps Harry getting his car back was God working through her, which of course would be okay. Harry, naturally, doesn't get this at all, and ends the call with a "yadda yadda" and a request that Michael stay in touch. 

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He's getting ready to go down to the lab when Susan calls. She takes his irritable answer in stride, and says
that she doesn't want to add to an already difficult day, but she's hoping he remembers the name of the "ritual killer" Harry and SI took down a few months ago. 

It takes Harry a minute to remember, but at long fucking last, Leonid Kravos's name is brought into the story. Also that Harry's most direct contact was with the demon, not the sorcerer himself. That puts some context on Harry's later assumption that the ghost of said demon is what's come back to cause problems for him. Susan won't tell Harry what she's working on until she's got something more solid than rumors, and Harry doesn't press the issue. Susan asks if she can help Harry with what he's working on, Harry asks if she slept okay, there's some flirting, and they get off the phone. 

Harry is finally able to head down to the lab, and we get our last reintroduction to Dresden's lab before the Great Grave Peril-Summer Knight reorganization. Everything is still messy (except the summoning circle) and still on mixed shelves and counters. I wouldn't swear to it, but I think this might also be the last book in which the little kerosene heater is mentioned. Also, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of this, he lights the candles from a lantern, rather than using magic. 

Bob is more than usually reluctant to wake up and work, pleading exhaustion. He's been helping Harry every night throughout this ghost situation, and now he's been woken up before sundown. He offers to work in exchange for doing a ridealong the next time Susan comes over. This is an obvious non-starter, and Harry points out that if Bob would rather not work for him, he could always go back to the Nevernever. This is the first reference in the series to Bob's difficulty with Mab, although she's referred to here only as "the Winter Queen". Technically, Harry says Bob could always go back to the "homeland", but of course we know that spirits of intellect are the result of spirits having sex with mortals, and all available evidence points to the mortal parent always being the one to carry the developing spirit until it's ready to emerge. So Bob was born to a mortal, and I'd say odds are considerably better than even that he was born here, in the mortal world. So I wouldn't say confidently that the Nevernever is Bob's homeland. He's a proper dual citizen, and which reality, if either, he considers "home" is really up to him. 

I do wonder, also, about this notion of Bob being "tired", like, I don't doubt it, but is that due to his own expenditure of energy, or is it a reflection of of Harry being tired and overwhelmed and seriously over this ghost business, and just wanting to relax for a while and spend time with his girlfriend. 

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Anyway, Harry's taunting about Bob going back (back?) to the Nevernever (and seriously, Harry, you just did the fantasy racism equivalent of telling a biracial person born in the US to 'go back where they came from' - don't do that) has Bob agitated enough to be fully awake, so Harry runs him through the new information, everything he's discovered of encountered over the past day and a half. Bob leaves Lydia alone for the time being, focusing on the Nightmare and making the reasonable assumption that the entity that did the torture spells also tore up the bushes outside St. Mary's. So far as I can recall, we don't at this stage have any evidence to support this other than that the odds of two ghosts or spirits of this power level running around at the same time are lower than the odds of just one. Bob is also terrified. He urges Harry to sit this one out, and suggests going on vacation somewhere very far away, and when Harry says they're not doing that, refuses to help. We see him react this way to the Denarian symbol in Death Masks, and I think to the mention of Kemmler in Dead Beat, and that's...interesting. Both of those are based on preexisting knowledge of what they're dealing with that Harry doesn't have. That's not the case here, as far as I know. Kravos is such a one-off problem, give or take his connection to Nemesis and the black council, in exactly the way that the Denarians and the heirs of Kemmler aren't. This suggests three possibilities. First, that Bob is frightened precisely because he, with his alarmingly extensive knowledge of necromancy and spirit work, has never encountered anything like this before. Second, that there is something identifiably Kemmlerite going on, and it's just never mentioned explicitly. Third, that Bob is mirroring Harry's fear and sense that he's in over his head. While the second possibility is the most interesting, it also has the least support. 

Since Bob isn't talking, Harry starts verbally reviewing everything he knows about ghosts. Ghosts aren't real people, they're impressions left when a person dies, unable to change or grow. They're usually invisible and intangible, but stronger ones may be able to physically manifest in an ectoplasmic body and move things around. Sometimes they can do other things, like cause earthquakes, but it's always connected in some way to their deaths or their feelings about them. Theoretically, a strong enough emotional imprint could produce a ghost as powerful as the Nightmare. 

When Harry says that the Nightmare's activity has been stirring up the boundary between worlds, and thereby creating the recent spike in ghost activity, Bob can no longer contain his didactic urges. He points out that someone has been stirring up the spirits deliberately (those torture spells weren't natural consequences of the increased ghostage) deliberately disrupting the barrier. He pointedly refuses to guess why anyone would do that, but Harry figures it's to prepare the way for something really big to come across. 

To Bob's immense irritation, this realization does not immediately prompt Harry to give up and take a nice long trip to Florida. He finally agrees to help. Apparently, if Harry doesn't know what he's walking into, he might not live to see the sun rise.