...you have a project plan for the completion of your space marine army.



Yes, Randall has needled me into getting serious about (finally?) completing a challenge. When we played 40k a few weeks ago Randall said he was already planning his "alternate army" for "just in case" I didn't finish the army that we're working on as a group project. Pfft.

In any case, the plan I've put together has me putting the final touches to the Captain on January 11th--a whole two weeks before Arcanacon. Good lord, what will I do with all that spare time in January.

In any case, I've already started on the first squad, so let's have a meet & greet.

( Click here to see photos. )

So here's the whole squad (so far):



By the plan, I'm meant to finish this squad by August 6th, which isn't that far away, and is only four days before my daughter is due to be born. Could be an interesting next few weeks--especially since we should also be moving house within the next 2-3 weeks!

And, for anyone following along at home, I'm currently more than a day ahead of schedule. ; )

--Mike

So we actually played a few games of 40k yesterday. Playing must have encouraged me to sit down and do some work on next year's marine army, because I actually sat down and did some work on next year's marine army.

I finished the test model a while ago, it came together reasonably well:



The next step is to build the first squad: a veteran sergeant leading a squad of ten, including a multimelta and a meltagun. I started doing that back in February some time, but haven't sat down for some serious time with the glue since then. So here's what I've done today:



The multimelta is fairly standard, although I used the bits from the Devastator kit:



The annoying part, though, is that the power cables from the backpack force you to position the multimelta itself pointing upwards--right across the marine's face. He can't see over his own weapon!

Marines in the new(ish) codex come standard armed with a bolt gun and a bolt pistol. So I'm arming every model in the army with precisely that--everyone will have a bolt pistol in a holster or elsewhere. In this model's case, it's in his hand:



My original concept for this squad was to have five marines kneeling down with shields, to form a shield wall as the front rank. So I got a pair of legs and I cut them at the ankles, knees and hips to make a pair of kneeling legs. There's a pair of kneeling legs in the Devastator kit, which would have been much easier, but they're braced on the left leg--the left knee and shin is on the ground with the right knee in the air. Try firing a gun with the recoil of a bolter from that position, and when you've picked yourself up off the ground and dusted yourself off let me know what's wrong with it. So I had to get the legs going the other way. Around three days later, I finally had it all together, pinned all the way through. Green stuff covered the gaps and I had my kneeling pair of legs. Great! Then I tried putting the rest of it together, and you know what? It just didn't work. Plus, I had better ideas for ways I could convert and pose the other models in the squad than a shield wall. But I still had this shield that I'd put together, so I stuck it together anyway. But I dropped the shield to the side and levelled the bolter out a little, like so:



What am I going to say about the shield to my opponents at Arcanacon? No idea... Maybe I should just cover the guy in grenades and say he has his own protection. : s

The last two in the squad are meant to be part of a mini-diorama: the general idea is that the marine on the left has run out of ammo (you can see the mag is missing from his boltgun) so he's waiting for his friend on the right to throw him a spare:



Here are some closeups:





As you can see, these two are just blu-tacked together at this point, as I'm not 100% sure about the precise poses. For the thrower, I had little choice but to pin and glue the arm together as there was no other way I was going to get it to sit down, even as a test of the pose. Plus, since there's no such thing as a space marine's right hand that isn't clenched in a fist, I had to take a left hand and cut the thumb off and put it on the other side, then transfer it to a right arm. Seemed to work okay as a right hand, but I'm not 100% sure about the thrower's pose.

Lastly for tonight, I've started putting together the meltagun marine as well. The general idea is that this is the "new guy" in the squad. I've given him Mk VIII armour, mainly as a bit of an in-joke amongst his squad mates; a sort of "here, you're new, take this really short-range but highly dangerous weapon that will make you a big target--and by the way you'd better wear the new armour for all that extra protection, because you're going to need it."

The only problem is that I'm finding it difficult to find a decent head for him. There are three options below:


Option 1: a normal space marine helmet.


Option 2: a Deathwatch marine head.


Option 3: a Catachan head.

So which one do you like best?

Poll #1394065 Which head works best?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 0

Which head do you think works best?

And now it's time I called it a night. : )

--Mike

...is how it all started.

Skynet is coming.

Well, another part of the test marine done--the packpack. Another part I frequently ignore at the end of painting. Now it's done.





( Click here to see paint scheme. )

I'll work out what colour to paint the skull later. : )

By the way, there's something I should tell you.



In August, I'm going to be a Dad. : )

I've been playing Warhammer 40,000 for more than ten years, but in all that time I've only collected two armies--necrons and dark eldar. In more than ten years I've only ever painted around 150 models. Maybe even not that many. And, despite the fact that space marines outsell all the other races of Warhammer 40,000 combined, I've never completed the collection of a space marine army.

In theory, next year all that will have changed.

I'm going to attempt to collect a 1200 point space marine army for next year's Arcanacon. For most people, this would be a doddle. But we're talking about me here. My greatest painting effort was before Arcanacon 2005, when I painted around three quarters of a necron army in two weeks. But I got almost no sleep for that whole time.

So now I'm going to try to take on a space marine army. I'm painting a test model at the moment, so we'll see how that goes. Wish me luck!



The test marine. It'll all come together.



Bolt gun. Most of the time I paint weapons last, which means I give them rather short shrift as I'm bored with painting the model by that stage. So I figured I'd get it out of the way. : )

( Click here to see the bolter's paint scheme. )

Watch this space. : )

Arcanacon, that annual pilgrimage of nerds, geeks and gamers, was on last weekend. Six games of Warhammer 40,000. The organisers this year wanted to run a tournament with 150 players (never been done before in the Southern Hemisphere) and after a couple of years where drop-outs brought us back to 120-130 players, they finally managed it this year. A hundred and fifty-three players with 1200 points each (or, in one memorable case, 1350) made for 183,600 points of miniatures. Or, if the average army costs around $400 to buy the miniatures, more than $60,000 worth of plastic and metal. And since painting a model typically triples its value for insurance purposes, almost $200,000 worth of stuff sitting around in plastic cases. And most of us were happy to leave our stuff lying around anywhere while we wandered off to lunch. ; )

Anyway, Arc this year was a blast. Last year and this year I've gone to the tournament with precisely the same goals: have some fun and who cares about the outcome of the games. Surprisingly, last year I came 29th and this year I came 32nd. Not bad for a guy who plays only 2-3 times a year.

Forthwith, my "after-the-game" photos. I've taken to setting up my commander and the enemy commander next to each other at the end of the game for a post-game photo shoot. It makes for a nice record of the game (as I remember a little more about it when I see the picture), and occasionally some interesting conversation points later on. One year there was a building on one of the tables I played on that was actually marked "Brewery and Distillery". I took a photo of the models out the front, just as if they were on the way to the pub after the game. ; )

( Click here to read battle reports and see photos )

Overall
I ended up coming 32nd (which I was delighted with), got 25/30 for my selection score, and 24/30 for my painting score (both of which I was happy with). This is also the first time in eight years of coming to Arcanacon that I've won more than two games, so I was happy with that too. I ended up with 79 battle points (out of a possible 120), the most I've ever had by almost twenty. Gotta be happy with that.

So now, thoughts turn to next year. Will we see the Red Dawn for a sixth year in a row? That's got to be some kind of record. Only time will tell...

The only work of Leiber's that I'd read by this point was The Big Time. I'm given to understand that his Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser series is quite popular, but I never came across it as a kid--instead I read Anne McCaffrey, Gillian Rubinstein, Arthur C. Clarke, Tom Clancy, Betsy Byars, Robin Klein and Roald Dahl. Not necessarily in that order!

The blurb on the back cover of my copy of The Wanderer didn't fill me with much confidence:

Something had happened to the stars

But Paul Hagbolt is sceptical, especially when margo and Miaow, her cat, drag him off to a loony Flying Saucer Symposium. Then, suddenly, the Wanderer appears--a gold and maroon Colossus straddling the sky, four times the diameter of the moon.

The Santa Monica mountains are 'stirred like stew'; the world is torn apart by earthquakes and devastated by giant tidal waves. Paul and Miaow are snatched up by a strange, cruelly attractive feline creature in a flying saucer, while those left behind must begin their desperate fight for survival.

Yeah, not so much...

The Wanderer is the story of several different people from all over the world, and their reactions to the abrupt appearance in the sky of a yellow-and-maroon object that is eventually determined to be roughly six times the size of the moon. Okay, you've got me interested. Giant planet appears in sky, cue worldwide panic.

Interestingly, Leiber chooses to take a decidedly scientific tack; several of his characters are astronomers (or the maligned UFOlogists of the back cover) and so are able to calculate the theoretical gravitational effects of an object of such mass (assuming a similar density to the moon) appearing so close to the earth. This also had me reading along with interest.

But the characters...good grief. They're either wooden, or annoying, or both. And more than a few of them are sexual repressives just waiting to unleash their inner sexuality. Onto anyone. Including people they've just met. Or on a roller coaster. Or with an alien cat-woman. Or with a military subordinate they've always hated.

What is with these people?!?

Even the six-year-old character cheers on the sexual union of a couple of the other characters at one point.

As if that distraction wasn't enough, there are more than a few characters whose sole purpose is to observe the effects of the object in locales to which the main characters do not have access, and then die--sometimes outside the confines of the narrative.

If there's one thing positive that can be said about the plot and its execution, its that the entire book reads like a disturbingly prescient vision of the modern disaster movie. It's the "everything's fine and dandy, I'm just living my li--WHAT THE F### IS THAT THING! OMGWTFBBQ!" followed by someone taking charge and asserting control, only for things to get worse, meaning some characters resign themselves to their fate and make peace with the world, others go crazy, and others just get more determined to survive. It's funny how my experiences watching films like The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, Deep Impact and so on informed my predictions as to who was going to die, when, how, and to what purpose.

Be warned, there are spoilers ahead now.










Towards the middle of the novel, Leiber reveals that the Wanderer is not a planet, it's actually a spacecraft inhabited by a confederation of alien life forms on the lam from the intergalactic cops. Apparently intergalactic civilisation has stagnated to the point where progress is inhibited and the entire culture is in danger of collapse. The Wanderer has stopped near Earth to refuel, but it isn't long before the Police Planet (yes, you read that right) rocks up and starts shooting.

The concept the fleeing aliens present is that they shouldn't have to deal with all this state interference. I mean, they just want to live free man, and like, cruise among the stars, and see what's in that funky hyperspace man. Because that is some top shit. Yeah. Groovy.

Having presented this notion of how cool and wonderful such passive rebellion can be, we are then subsequently treated to a scene of teenagers terrorising the traffic snarls that are attempting to leave the populated areas. Not only are said teenagers copulating with joyous abandon (one part of me wondered how that was different to the other "adult" characters, but anyway...), they are also actively singling people out, robbing them and possibly killing them. These teenagers are portrayed as everything bad about society--and guess why? Because they are rebelling against society's broad "rules".

The sheer hypocrisy almost made me throw the book across the room.










Oh, and one last thing. "The Wanderer" is the name adopted by the public for the object that appears in their sky. The word "planet" comes from the ancient Greek word πλανήτοι (planetoi), meaning "Wanderer"; the Greeks thought the planets they could see in the night sky were actually wandering stars. Leiber turns that back on itself to name the object in English. What irks me is that there's one group on the East Coast of the US who coins the name "Wanderer", only for a separate character on the West Coast to explain why he chose the name "Wanderer". Wha? Does Leiber just want us to assume that every character in the book came up with the same name for the object independently because they have an intimate knowledge of ancient Greek?

I found The Wanderer a hard slog--just the thought of going back to those same self-absorbed and/or completely annoying characters made me want to read something else. In fact, I think the only sympathetic characters in the entire book were the guy stuck on the Moon when the Wanderer appeared, and the six year old girl and her mother. The rest of them I would quite cheerfully have placed directly in the path of Deep Impact's asteroid.

Not recommended.

It's just occurred to me that perhaps Jessica Mauboy should have considered the lyrics to her latest release a little more carefully.

Get me a doctor, 'cause this is startin' to burn

I'm sure it's meant to refer to her passionate feelings, but I do keep hearing those reports of declining condom use amongst kids these days.

So by now I've read through the first ten winners of the Hugo Award. In order, they are:

1953: The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
1955: They'd Rather Be Right, Mark Clifton & Frank Riley
1956: Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein
1958: The Big Time, Fritz Leiber
1959: A Case of Conscience, James Blish
1960: Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
1961: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.
1962: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
1963: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
1964: Way Station, Clifford D. Simak

The Hugo Awards weren't organised as an annual event until 1955, and in 1957 they weren't awarded to specific pieces of fiction. Presumably they went to individuals instead.

So what have I found out so far? Well, it's certainly been an interesting ride. My favourites would have to be Double Star and The Man in the High Castle. My least favourites would be They'd Rather be Right and A Canticle for Leibowitz (for completely opposite reasons). In terms of whether I'd recommend them:

Highly recommended
Double Star, even to folks who wouldn't normally read science fiction/fantasy.
The Man in the High Castle

Recommended
The Demolished Man
Starship Troopers
Stranger in a Strange Land

Interesting but Indifferent
A Case of Conscience
Way Station

Not Recommended
They'd Rather Be Right
The Big Time

Special Circumstances
A Canticle for Leibowitz; I can appreciate that the book's well written and has things to say, I just didn't enjoy it all that much.

Out of all ten books, before I started on this trek I'd only heard of two, and only read and owned one (Stranger in a Strange Land).

Now comes another era: in 1965, the first Nebula Award was given. From now until 1973 (when the first Campbell Award was given), I'll be reading the Hugo and Nebula winners from each year. They are:

The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber (Hugo 1965)
Dune, Frank Herbert (Nebula 1965, Hugo 1966 (tie))
Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany (Nebula 1966 (tie))
This Immortal, Roger Zelazny (Hugo 1966 (tie))
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes (Nebula 1966 (tie))
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein (Hugo 1967)
The Einstein Intersection, Samuel R. Delany (Nebula 1967)
Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny (Hugo 1968)
Rite of Passage, Alexei Panshin (Nebula 1968)
Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner (Hugo 1969)
The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin (Nebula 1969, Hugo 1970)
Ringworld, Larry Niven (Nebula 1970, Hugo 1971)
A Time of Changes, Robert Silverberg (Nebula 1971)
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer (Hugo 1972)
The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov (Nebula 1972, Hugo 1973)

I've found and bought all of those except for Panshin and Farmer. Wish me luck!

Way Station is the story of Enoch Wallace, a man selected by an intergalactic alien confederation to run Earth's way station--a bus stop among the stars, if you will. Interstellar travel is possible via a means of teleportation (although I can't recall whether the entire body is teleported or the mind is merely teleported into a reconstructed body at the other end). However, said teleportation has a limited range, and consequently way stations--like Enoch's--are placed around the inhabited universe as stopping-off points.

Enoch's time running the way station is relatively uneventful, until others--including the earthly government--begin to take an interest in the fact that he doesn't seem to age. In fact, Enoch is more than 100 years old--having fought in the American Civil War--but part of his job description is that he doesn't age. That way, the aliens don't have to find someone else to run the way station when he dies. Simak deals with the obvious "why don't the aliens use an alien to run it?" question during the course of the novel.

The interesting thing about Way Station is that for around two thirds of the book, there is no plot. We watch Enoch's day-to-day life, see him interacting with his neighbours (an unfriendly hillbilly clan) and the postman, and begin to understand Enoch's personality and motivations.

It's only when you feel comfortable with Enoch's character that Simak springs the plot on you.

I can't imagine any editor letting this book out the door today. It's just too pedestrian for two thirds of it. But that's what really makes it charming. The plot sneaks up on you, and you have plenty of time to get used to the characters and--better yet--when the plot train does arrive the characters react in ways that are consistent with their behaviour throughout the rest of the novel.

In the end, Way Station is a charming but not world-changing book that gives a glimmer of insight into the shape of things to come for science fiction as a genre. It's worth reading if you have the spare time (or space in your reading calendar), but don't give up something else just to fit it in.

Up until this point, I hadn't read anything by Dick. Not Androids, not Ubik, nothing. So I came to this novel only knowing Dick from the films I've seen that have been adapted from his works (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Next, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and Paycheck) and his reputation as someone who spent most of his time on mind-altering substances and/or going through serious bouts of mental illness.

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history novel. In its version of history, the Axis Powers won the second world war, and the United States is divided between the Germans occupying the eastern seaboard, and the Japanese occupying the west. The Rocky Mountain States form a buffer zone between the two powers. Martin Bormann is leader of the Third Reich.

One of the most outstanding features of the novel is the way Dick manages to write an entire alternate history without writing a history book. I have at best only a passing knowledge of the events of the second world war, and I probably have at most a basic level of knowledge (similar to anyone on the street) about the Nazi Party's agenda. But Dick takes these common threads--accessible by almost anyone--and uses them to weave a canvas for his story.

The characters never fall into the "as you know Bob" trap. The reader is treated like an adult and expected to follow along and make his or her own interpretations. The plot of the novel is dramatically affected by events occurring outside the sphere of the characters' observations (and/or before the novel begins), but Dick works these events into the plot in such a skilful fashion that you're never left wondering "hang on, why did that happen and how does that make sense?"

And through it all, Dick weaves a story of a novel-within-the-novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, about an alternate world where the Axis Powers lost the second world war. From some of the quoted passages, it's clear that this alternate world isn't ours--not exactly--but the Grasshopper novel provides a driving force for several of the characters' interwoven stories. The author of Grasshopper is the titular "Man in the High Castle", and his identity and motivations form the mystery component of the plot.

And although I've said all this already, I still haven't mentioned what it's about. But finding that out is most of the fun.

Suffice to say that The Man in the High Castle follows half a dozen or so major characters who interact with The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the I Ching, and each other in various ways. There's never an over-arching goal. There's never a big target for them to reach. We just follow them as their lives become intertwined, and we begin to understand what makes them who they are, and why each one of them is dissatisfied.

I'll be interested to see how the other Philip K. Dick book on the list (Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said) compares to this one.

An excellent book; highly recommended.

I'm not really sure what I can add to the wealth of critical analysis that's already out there about this novel.

Stranger in a Strange Land takes an opposite tack to the majority of Heinlein's fiction, seeking to render attractive a civilisation and culture that is seemingly diametrically opposed to the "traditional" central Western value of enlightened self-interest. Jubal Harshaw is the Heinlein stand-in in this novel, and as the novel develops, Harshaw becomes the main character, usurping Valentine Michael Smith's position.

What I found particularly absorbing about this novel (and what will always hook me with any novel) is the fact that several of the characters are capable of translating observations to generalisations and theories that are ultimately almost always true. That may seem an obscure drawcard, but it's one of those things that I really enjoy reading about. I like my cerebral discussions about the nature of humanity. : )

The storyline is fairly simple on the surface: Michael is the son of two astronauts sent on a mission to Mars. The entire crew perishes, and it's not until a subsequent mission arrives twenty years later that Michael is retrieved, having grown up among Martians with a Martian philosophy and sensibilities. The novel subsequently follows Michael's attempts to first adapt to human culture, and then to "improve" it using what he has learned from his enlightened Martian compatriots.

Whether Michael is ultimately successful in his quest to build a "better" humanity is left open at the end of the novel, which I quite like. Michael has had an obvious effect on those who know him closely, improving their lives manyfold, but will he affect the great unwashed? Who can tell?

Recommended.

Perhaps somewhat ironically, when I started reading this, I thought of a particular episode in Babylon 5. When J. Michael Straczynski wrote that episode, after he'd got halfway through it he started thinking of A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Canticle follows the travails of the inhabitants of an abbey in the American southwest, eking out an impoverished existence and preserving scientific knowledge after an apocalyptic nuclear exchange. It's broken into three separate parts: Fiat Homo (let there be man), Fiat Lux (let there be light), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (let thy will be done). The cast changes completely from section to section (there are 600 years between each section), which meant the characters I only just managed to get to grips with in the first section were gone before I knew it. The jarring shift through time periods isn't helped by the fact that almost none of Miller's characters are actually likeable. Brother Francis is an irritating pedant, Thon Taddeo is an arrogant bastard wearing blinkers, and Abbot Zerchi is a well-meaning pacifist who would prefer to sigh and wring his hands than take any action--about anything.

I'll cheerfully admit that much of the appeal of this novel went over my head. Miller appeared to me to spend too much time on amusing himself and like-minded individuals, and not enough on plot, which proceeded at a glacial pace (if at all). Like The Great Gatsby, I came out the other side of the book thinking to myself "I know that should have been a wondrous experience...but I still don't get it".

If you like literature, you'll probably like this, but it was just too high-brow for me. I can barely wade through most of Margaret Atwood's stuff--and her now-public derision for "science fiction" means I no longer bother trying.

The one thing I will say is that perhaps Miller's work is a victim of time--to me the novel's structure and its recurring theme of alpha and omega just seem trite. Having said that, it would appear that critical opinions of Canticle have actually improved with time, so I may well be in the minority there.

Recommended only if you're into reading "literary science fiction".

Okay, first a confession: I enjoyed Starship Troopers the movie. There. I said it. Now let's move on.

I wasn't terribly surprised to discover that the film was significantly different from the book. I was interested to discover that Johnny Rico's teacher in the film (played by Michael Ironside) is a concatenation of two separate characters in the novel. Having read a few Heinlein novels in the past, I wasn't terribly surprised either to discover a Heinlein stand-in in the form of Jean Dubois, Rico's school teacher for History and Moral Philosophy. What I did find interesting (given some of the furore over the novel, of which I am only peripherally aware) is that the novel is far less jingoistic or absolutist than the film.

Verhoeven took what I believe to be an interesting angle with the film, which was to produce something of a satire of the trajectory of post-WW2 America by comparing it (through fashion, newscasts, iconography and prevalent attitudes) to Nazi Germany. The book, on the other hand, is largely played straight. If the stuff I've read is to be believed, Starship Troopers may well have been an essay by Heinlein defending his own defence of the United States' nuclear testing programme--a position that invited many attacks by his contemporaries in the late 1950s.

Many people, having watched the film, wrote it off as cheesy, poorly acted, and needlessly brash. Take it at face value and I would wholeheartedly agree, but the presence of newscasters making drops with the combat troops in the film to beam glorious images back home isn't just a plot device to sow uncertainty about Rico's fate, it's a comment on our voracious need for more pictures, more information, more detail. It's a well-worn path--Death Race 2000 did it in the 70s, The Running Man in the 80s, Series 7 in the 00s. Or Battle Royale if you want a Japanese version. I've always Wondered why more people didn't compare Starship Troopers (the film) to those properties.

Still, enough about the film and book comparisons.

Starship Troopers the book isn't quite up to the level of impact of Double Star (which is highly personal), or Stranger in a Strange Land (which is largely transcendent of barriers), but it does make you think about governance, the value of the franchise, and about how we go about making our choices in life, and in electing public officials. At least, that's what it did for me.

If I may be permitted another comparison, the single greatest influence on my still-nascent critical approach to politics and governance has been the film V for Vendetta, viz: "people shouldn't be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people". Regardless of what you think about the film itself, it was that sentiment (and all the baggage that comes with it) that started me off on the trail to actually caring about how our country (and to a wider extent, the world) is being run.

Starship Troopers, I suspect, would have done the same thing for me had I read it first.

And funnily enough, almost the least important part of the book to me is the plot. The plot of the book felt more like a canvas upon which the actual themes and morality of the book could be debated, which might sound unusual, but it's how the book approached me, anyway.

Recommended.

So my run at Tessa's Seven Wishes comes to an end.

A brief peek behind the curtain: I originally hadn't planned to write a connected series of stories. In fact, my original "King" story was going to be completely different--something about Patrick Stewart and Men In Tights--but I saw an opportunity to weld them into a running storyline, and better yet, to hold them to a theme that is close to my heart: growing up.

Time was to me about realising the power--and responsibilities--of becoming something more than a child, whilst also being less than an adult.

King was a simple piece about rebellion--that period in a teenage life when they believe everything is owed to them and nothing is forbidden.

Migration is about that difficult point in life where you realise that you know what? You're not infallible. That there are bigger and scarier people out there than you. But for those who come through the other side (like the narrator did), they gain a different kind of strength.

Obvious is more about the harsh realities of life, about realising that there are no support mechanisms out there beyond those you build yourself.

Sharing is about developing lasting networks--realising that you need to lean on others as well as relying on yourself.

Bear is about that all too human realisation that there's more out there you don't have...that there's always somewhere else you need to go, something else you need to do, or you won't feel complete.

And Revolution is about the point in life where you finally take control of your own destiny. I can't say I've reached that point yet, but I try every day.

I did wonder whether Tessa thought the bear had stumped me. ; )

This has been a fascinating experiment for me, and I'd like to thank Tessa for giving me permission to play along in her sandpit. I hope I didn't kick over your sandcastle, Tessa.

ETA: Time King Migration Obvious Sharing Bear Revolution? Sign me up! ; )

--Mike