OK, so I'm tinkering with the Blogging application Moveable Type. You are reading the result. That's just about all that I decided to write for now.

I have posted a new image in the Portfolio gallery. It is the Trump of the Plaza at the End of the World in the Courts of Chaos, as described in the new novel Dawn of Amber (a new trilogy of books based on Roger Zelazny's Amber setting).

The book describes a "gloomy keep", with the sky behind it neatly divided almost in two. The left half of the edifice is lost in night and storm, the right is lit by a dazzling sky of red, yellow, and orange, as if someone had taken a jar of these three colors of sand and shaken it, leaving every grain visible, but no one color dominating.

I depict a slightly different interpretation of the right-hand sky. I decided that each color would behave slightly differently, produce an eternal competition for dominance. The red patches seem to reach tendrils out to one another. Yellow runs like liquid or drip and melt like hot wax. The orange forms whorls and eddies between and on the other colors, eternally mixing and blending them to create more of itself.

In the original novels, Chaos is also described in similar fashion. Red, Orange, and Yellow are probably not the only colors in the color-mad sky, and the Chaosians in Merlin's series seem to tell time by the dominant hue, along with the "turning" (the sky revolves slowly about a point directly overhead). (This paragraph is from memory; I need to reread the books.)

"Bluesky, third turning" would mean a mostly bluish colored-half which has made two complete revolutions without losing dominance.

I'd imagine that the sky turns fast enough to be useful as the division of a day, probably something on the order of once per hour.

The colors probably shift dominance in larger periods of time corresponding to several turns. Each "sky" then, would be a larger division of a day, like "morning" (bluesky), "noon" (yellowsky), "evening" (redsky), and so forth. It has order, after a fashion (otherwise it would be useless for telling time), but anyone looking at the eternal war of the colors could hardly call the sky of Chaos predictable. (The idea that Chaos contains randomness AND order should not seem strange to anyone familiar with the eponymous branch of mathematics dealing with it.)

Books I have recently bought, read, or am currently reading:

* The Skies of Pern (halfway done)
* The Ringworld Throne
* Bhagavad-Gita
* The Dawn of Amber (done)
* Watership Down (done)
* The Ringworld Engineers (I've already read it, and bought it mostly for completeness' sake)

This will probably trigger me rereading:

* The Great Book of Amber
* All of the Pern books that I own

I am also currently rereading:

* The more-than-complete Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Finished the Pern book about 4 hours after my last post. I'm now 3/4ths the way through rereading Ringworld Engineers after discovering I'd forgotten a lot of what happened. I started it last night after I spent most of yesterday watching the rest of the Stargate SG-1 Season 2 set.

You might say I can get a bit voracious about both books and videos when I'm on a roll... I just have a lot of inertia.

Today I put in an order for the first two volumes of the anime Excel Saga, which seems incredibly insane, just how I like it. I also got the Buffy Season 2 set (finally -- I've been slacking).